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In defense of Java blocking calls, in the 1990s to the 2010's the industry mostly considered Asynchronous programming as coordinating multiple threads over know

In defense of Java blocking calls, in the 1990s to the 2010's the industry mostly considered Asynchronous programming as coordinating multiple threads over know yield points - such as using atomic locks, or mutexs. The main push by the industry was all about abstractions and OOP, and moving away from static C/C++ programming languages to dynamic programming languages such as Java/Python/Visual Basic or C#. It is only until recently with the popularity of Node.js, Python and the explosion of the web that the developer have to deal with single threaded languages that blocking calls are a significant impact to the users experience. This push for Async in the web has had a cascade effect to system programming languages where old time developers are only first learning about it.

BalinKing 2y ago
Could you clarify the "static C/C++" vs "dynamic Java" distinction? I'm used to thinking of "static" and "dynamic" in the context of type systems, but do the terms have overloaded meanings in concurrency/parallelism?
hinkley 2y ago
It was also pushed by the C10K movement.
- hackit2 2y ago
  True, one great thing that did come out from it is that the language needs to natively support asynchronous programming with syntactical sugar otherwise you get an explosion of libraries/frameworks that solve the problem with their own problems. How-ever this is a chicken/egg problem, did everyone really need async or did it come about because the proliferation of frameworks to solve this common pattern?
neonsunset 2y ago
The push for async as we know it started in .NET, initially with F# and then popularized by C#, with the pattern then adopted by JS, Swift, Python, Rust and other languages. The implementations, however, are wildly different.
- hackit2 2y ago
  I thought F# was a derivative of OCamel that focused exclusively on immutable data structure and functional programming, instead of mutable/imperative languages.
  - neonsunset 2y ago
    https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-f-asynchronous-programming-model/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-f-a...

BalinKing 2y ago

Could you clarify the "static C/C++" vs "dynamic Java" distinction? I'm used to thinking of "static" and "dynamic" in the context of type systems, but do the terms have overloaded meanings in concurrency/parallelism?

hinkley 2y ago

It was also pushed by the C10K movement.

hackit2 2y ago
True, one great thing that did come out from it is that the language needs to natively support asynchronous programming with syntactical sugar otherwise you get an explosion of libraries/frameworks that solve the problem with their own problems. How-ever this is a chicken/egg problem, did everyone really need async or did it come about because the proliferation of frameworks to solve this common pattern?

neonsunset 2y ago

The push for async as we know it started in .NET, initially with F# and then popularized by C#, with the pattern then adopted by JS, Swift, Python, Rust and other languages. The implementations, however, are wildly different.

hackit2 2y ago
I thought F# was a derivative of OCamel that focused exclusively on immutable data structure and functional programming, instead of mutable/imperative languages.
- neonsunset 2y ago
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-f-asynchronous-programming-model/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-f-a...