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A computer is a mutation machine, you cannot escape mutation by hand-waving it away. If you are writing programs in which you can achieve concurrency without t
by cle 6y ago
A computer is a mutation machine, you cannot escape mutation by hand-waving it away. If you are writing programs in which you can achieve concurrency without threads and shared memory, it’s because you’re building on the shoulders of all the engineers who didn’t hand-wave it away. Many of us, due to product requirements, don’t have the luxury of using higher level abstractions like that.
- mrkeen 6y agoAnd yet we're comfortable hand-waving GOTO away - that is, not calling computers GOTO machines.
- cle 6y agoThere are thousands of engineers (at least) who use it or its equivalent every day. Just because they’ve built abstractions that allow you to ignore it, doesn’t mean nobody has to deal with it anymore.
- lostcolony 6y agoBut that's identical to what he's saying; he's not saying no one has to deal with mutable memory. Just that most developers who need concurrency shouldn't have to. Same as registers, GOTO, etc.
- cle 6y agoThat's not what they said. They said "nothing is cool about a tutorial on creation of threads", and that the cool thing is "achieving concurrency without threads/race conditions/shared memory" which ironically is only enabled by all the engineers who spend their time working on and maintaining those "uncool" things. If they don't need to use threads, then good for them. But to dismiss threads and learning material about threads as "uncool" is just silly. The thing that enables that misunderstanding is all the work that's done on them in the first place.