Is concurrency hard?

[Robert Raschke]

Mats wrote:
>    i believe the only reason concurrency is percieved as hard is cultural; 
> programmers are trained to think sequentially. this in turn is because C++ is 
> glorified C, C is glorified assembly, and assembly is sequential because CPU's are.
>    so no, concurrency isn't hard. what's hard is to unlearn the habit of turning 
> everything into a sequential problem.

Umm, try telling "CPU's are sequential" to the people who design and
make them.  I'm sure they'll disagree quite violently.

In my experience, it's one of the big culture clashes, the people who
deal with hardware (where things are more like Joe descibes) and the
people who do software (who would just love to abstract everything
into their sequential view of the world) have enormous difficulties
talking to each other.

I believe that concurrent programming is hard to most people, because
of the poor abstractions used by most programmers, i.e., state, lots
of it.

Robby