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We've spent decades developing a huge software/hardware edifice that we all stand atop of, thinking in terms of a single thread. The majority of programmers sti

We've spent decades developing a huge software/hardware edifice that we all stand atop of, thinking in terms of a single thread. The majority of programmers still have to actively push themselves to think in more than one thread (and why would they - the majority of problems programmers come across are single-threaded). I don't know if there a whole other edifice of computing out there, built atop of decades of thinking in terms of multiple threads, but I have sympathy to the idea that if it's out there, we'd have an awful lot of trouble conceptualising it, and an awful awful lot of trouble conceptualising it after decades of development. I don't know what kind of practical problems 4000 CPUs will solve that 16CPUs can't, but I give weight to the argument that the way we think, the problems we've created for ourselves and subsequently solved, could have blinded us to them.

rbanffy 8y ago
There is much that can be done that isn't easily done because of the way software and hardware evolved together. We think single threaded because our languages express single threads and because our languages express single threads the processors we use have to do outrageous things to reorder instructions trying to extract some meager parallelism across a couple execution units and do all this behind our backs. And, because they do that well enough, we don't bother inventing many new languages for doing that explicitly. You can't easily express "do these two independent things as you can and, when finished, do this other thing" in C (or Python, or Java) and it's up to brave compiler writers to figure out (sometimes erroneously) what can be done with the independent execution flows.
JadeNB 8y ago
> the majority of problems programmers come across are single-threaded Surely it's solutions (or rather programs), not problems, that are single-threaded? A problem can probably be solved in many ways, and the fact that many programmers will first reach for a single-threaded program to solve it doesn't mean that's the only, or even the best, way to solve it.

rbanffy 8y ago

There is much that can be done that isn't easily done because of the way software and hardware evolved together. We think single threaded because our languages express single threads and because our languages express single threads the processors we use have to do outrageous things to reorder instructions trying to extract some meager parallelism across a couple execution units and do all this behind our backs. And, because they do that well enough, we don't bother inventing many new languages for doing that explicitly. You can't easily express "do these two independent things as you can and, when finished, do this other thing" in C (or Python, or Java) and it's up to brave compiler writers to figure out (sometimes erroneously) what can be done with the independent execution flows.

JadeNB 8y ago

> the majority of problems programmers come across are single-threaded Surely it's solutions (or rather programs), not problems, that are single-threaded? A problem can probably be solved in many ways, and the fact that many programmers will first reach for a single-threaded program to solve it doesn't mean that's the only, or even the best, way to solve it.