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Everyone's got to start somewhere! In the sentence before I explicitly said I was a newbie to this stuff at the time. Obviously it's not exotic to a more exper

Everyone's got to start somewhere! In the sentence before I explicitly said I was a newbie to this stuff at the time. Obviously it's not exotic to a more experienced developer :)

voidlogic 14y ago
My point was that a semaphore is freshmen or sophomore level undergrad stuff, something I would expect every professional developer to understand. Here someone who considers themselves a developer, which I assume means a professional software developer, considers it an exotic construct. Things like this shakes my faith in the computer science educational system.
- Tyr42 14y ago
  I'm a CS student at a university known for it's CS program. I know about semaphores, but this has not been covered in any of the first or second year classes.
  - voidlogic 14y ago
    I'm sure you will see it before you graduate, whenever you take your basic operating systems course.
- dtwwtd 14y ago
  In our program at Michigan, concurrency isn't really discussed until your 3rd or 4th year when/if you take the operating systems course.
- EvilTrout 14y ago
  I think you're being a bit dramatic about little part of one sentence. There are many application developers out there using Rails, PHP or Django who can go years without invoking locks or semaphores due to the strengths of the APIs and frameworks they use. As they learn and grow as developers, they will be introduced to new problems and solutions. A semaphore can be exotic, not because they've never heard of it before, but because they've not used them very much outside of that one assignment they did in CS 5 years ago. How about instead of criticizing people's eductions, we encourage them to be mindful about what they don't know, and to learn whatever they can when they get a chance?
  - voidlogic 14y ago
    "How about instead of criticizing people's eductions, we encourage them to be mindful about what they don't know, and to learn whatever they can when they get a chance?" I'm all for people learning things they were not taught in school and I commend you for that. But as the field grows there will be more and more material that was traditionally taught, but is now dropped. For example, I could imagine a misguided department dropping a once required OS/Systems class to allow students to choose that as an elective, or maybe a node.js or Ruby elective instead. I think those kind of program changes are serious and need discussion-
- brodney 14y ago
  Not everyone who does this was in a CS Program. When I learned about them, I went with a lock-free model for my own project because semaphores seemed to add more complexity than they solved. I can understand the author's desire not to use them.

Everyone's got to start somewhere! In the sentence before I explicitly said I was a newbie to this stuff at the time. Obviously it's not exotic to a more experienced developer :)

voidlogic 14y ago

My point was that a semaphore is freshmen or sophomore level undergrad stuff, something I would expect every professional developer to understand. Here someone who considers themselves a developer, which I assume means a professional software developer, considers it an exotic construct. Things like this shakes my faith in the computer science educational system.

Tyr42 14y ago
I'm a CS student at a university known for it's CS program. I know about semaphores, but this has not been covered in any of the first or second year classes.
- voidlogic 14y ago
  I'm sure you will see it before you graduate, whenever you take your basic operating systems course.
dtwwtd 14y ago
In our program at Michigan, concurrency isn't really discussed until your 3rd or 4th year when/if you take the operating systems course.
EvilTrout 14y ago
I think you're being a bit dramatic about little part of one sentence. There are many application developers out there using Rails, PHP or Django who can go years without invoking locks or semaphores due to the strengths of the APIs and frameworks they use. As they learn and grow as developers, they will be introduced to new problems and solutions. A semaphore can be exotic, not because they've never heard of it before, but because they've not used them very much outside of that one assignment they did in CS 5 years ago. How about instead of criticizing people's eductions, we encourage them to be mindful about what they don't know, and to learn whatever they can when they get a chance?
- voidlogic 14y ago
  "How about instead of criticizing people's eductions, we encourage them to be mindful about what they don't know, and to learn whatever they can when they get a chance?" I'm all for people learning things they were not taught in school and I commend you for that. But as the field grows there will be more and more material that was traditionally taught, but is now dropped. For example, I could imagine a misguided department dropping a once required OS/Systems class to allow students to choose that as an elective, or maybe a node.js or Ruby elective instead. I think those kind of program changes are serious and need discussion-
brodney 14y ago
Not everyone who does this was in a CS Program. When I learned about them, I went with a lock-free model for my own project because semaphores seemed to add more complexity than they solved. I can understand the author's desire not to use them.