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Re: You must read this



"B.M. Cook" wrote:
The paper contains many quotable sentences, it's well worth a few minutes of
your time.
"Java's Insecure Parallelism"
by Per Brinch Hanson
ACM SIGPLAN Notices 34, 4 (April 1999), pp38-45.

'Pulls no punches' is one of the phrases that comes to mind.
('Calls a spade a f*ing great shovel' is another --- ooer ... am I allowed to say that on this list  :-)

I quote:

"In 1975 Concurrent Pascal demonstrated that platform-independent parallel programs (even small operating systems) can be written in a secure programming language with monitors. It is astounding to me that Java's insecure parallelism is taken seriously by the programming community, a quarter of a century after the invention of monitors and Concurrent Pascal. It has no merit.

"Although the development of parallel languages began around 1972, it did not stop there. Today we have three major communications paradigms: monitors, remote procedure calls and message passing. Any one of them would have been a vast improvement over Java's insecure variant of shared classes. As it is, Java ignores the last twenty-five years of research in parallel languages." (Per Brinch Hansen)

[italics as per the paper - strong stuff!]

Rick
--
Richard Beton B.Sc. C.Phys. M.Inst.P.
Roke Manor Research Limited (http://www.roke.co.uk/)
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