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What I got out of this presentation: "You thought the only way to do concurrency was by using synchronization primitives? Surprise! You can also do it by messag

by slavak 16y ago

What I got out of this presentation: "You thought the only way to do concurrency was by using synchronization primitives? Surprise! You can also do it by message-passing between processes!" What I think of this: Say whaaaaaaaaaaat? Message-passing as a concurrency model? That's crazy talk! Brilliant crazy talk! I wish this was such common knowledge that it was being taught in undergraduate "Parallel Programming" courses everywhere. Oh wait... IT TOTALLY IS!

nikster 16y ago
Pfft - I've seen way too many code bases with random threading code. Speaking of Java here - what's needed is that it's simply not possible to write new Thread(foo).start(); - the message passing model has to be enforced. I mean, read the Java documentation! What they say about threading is this: "Something slow? Just throw it in a background thread!". It's inane.
dkarl 16y ago
The carryover from computer science education to practice is so weak that you have to teach and persuade all over again. People leave school, get a job, and spend five years only using knowledge from their sophomore "Data Structures in C" class while struggling to catch up on all the critical stuff that their CS program taught them nothing about (SQL, source control, release management, etc.) Having misunderstood the purpose of undergraduate education, they believe this experience discredits everything they were taught in school, so they hold you to a higher threshold of proof if you're pitching ideas they heard in upper-level CS courses than if you're pitching ideas they've never heard before.
KirinDave 16y ago
Is that really true? I meet very few people, even fresh out of good schools, who have any practical knowledge of the Actor model. Many have heard of it, but most don't know that about even basic concepts surrounding it like Needham's Duality.
- slavak 16y ago
  While my CDP class didn't explicitly discuss the Actor Model, message-passing as a concurrency model was studied and we did implement algorithms using it. How basic is the Actor Model for implementing concurrency using message-passing, besides the obvious advantage of formally defining a common language of terms and proven theorems for what you're doing?

by slavak 16y ago

nikster 16y ago

Pfft - I've seen way too many code bases with random threading code. Speaking of Java here - what's needed is that it's simply not possible to write new Thread(foo).start(); - the message passing model has to be enforced. I mean, read the Java documentation! What they say about threading is this: "Something slow? Just throw it in a background thread!". It's inane.

dkarl 16y ago

The carryover from computer science education to practice is so weak that you have to teach and persuade all over again. People leave school, get a job, and spend five years only using knowledge from their sophomore "Data Structures in C" class while struggling to catch up on all the critical stuff that their CS program taught them nothing about (SQL, source control, release management, etc.) Having misunderstood the purpose of undergraduate education, they believe this experience discredits everything they were taught in school, so they hold you to a higher threshold of proof if you're pitching ideas they heard in upper-level CS courses than if you're pitching ideas they've never heard before.

KirinDave 16y ago

Is that really true? I meet very few people, even fresh out of good schools, who have any practical knowledge of the Actor model. Many have heard of it, but most don't know that about even basic concepts surrounding it like Needham's Duality.

slavak 16y ago
While my CDP class didn't explicitly discuss the Actor Model, message-passing as a concurrency model was studied and we did implement algorithms using it. How basic is the Actor Model for implementing concurrency using message-passing, besides the obvious advantage of formally defining a common language of terms and proven theorems for what you're doing?