Meyer, OO and concurrency

Peter-Henry Mander erlang@REDACTED
Tue Jul 12 17:09:35 CEST 2005


Hi Todd,

True, concurrency isn't in itself a new idea. It's the preconception
that concurrent programming is itself intrinsically hard that gets my
goat (*). The fact that is *is* hard in C++/Java/FlavourOfTheMonth
language is an indictment.

I agree that the KISS bunch tend to avoid concurrency unless they're
compelled to use it, for the same reasons above that the tools just
don't hack it.

There is also a managerial school of thought which encourages the use of
the lowest possible common denominator when choosing programming tools
and methods...

I do apologise, I seem to drifted off into another rant!

Pete.

(*) ... however, concurrency problems like race conditions can be quite
tricky to handle sometimes, but that may be blamed on inadequate design.
Mea culpa.

On Tue, 2005-07-12 at 07:35 -0700, todd wrote:
> Peter-Henry Mander wrote:
> 
> >I ask myself *why* has it taken soooo long to recognise the need for
> >concurrency? 
> >
> You've always been able to do concurrency, so maybe it wasn't seen as a 
> dramatic need. I never did. I could always add it. I was happy that Java 
> had concurrency until I saw how broken it was.
> 
> And don't forget you still have a lot of people, especially in the agile 
> keep it simple camp, that say concurrency is an unecessary complexity. 
> The exact opposite of seeing concurrency as a fundamental building 
> block. They have, of course, thrown the baby out with the bath water, 
> but the attitude is common.
> 
> 
> 





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