That is a very fair statement. It is certainly true that threads are a more successful abstraction than garbage collection. Perhaps a better statement is to ob

That is a very fair statement. It is certainly true that threads are a more successful abstraction than garbage collection. Perhaps a better statement is to observe that garbage collection has improved continuously over time and expanded the range of applications where garbage collection is used (as an aside if we look at the GC systems developed by Azul we get a indication of where GC can take us in the future). Meanwhile the abstractions we are using to replace threads tend to be restricted to certain domains. A recent example of this would be the really interesting discussion around the use of green threads in Rust. https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-November/006550.html https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-November/00... Rust started with a user-space light weight threads system built into the language and has since pushed that into library. The issue was that green threads are tricky abstraction in some domains. Although my comment above was clumsy, I really just wanted to add the linked conversation between Rich Hickey and Cliff Click, because I felt it was a really good illustration of what josefk was saying, which I understood to be roughly that the comparison with GOTO isn't quite right, because we don't have a small neat set of constructs, like if, while and for etc, to replace it. Replacing threads looks like it will be much harder.