Re: TechEd 2006 -- "parallelism is the new OO"

[tjoccam@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Andrew, you are right on, especially on complexity. I didn't see this till
now because I was busy with my new job teaching math in a community
college.

> <SNIP>
> It is hard to own an opinion that says, "we're going in the wrong
direction!"

Nevertheless I think it's what has to happen. I still think so, even
though thinking so has gotten me exiled from the computing world. There
are foundational problems (literally) with the metaphor-based languages
and OSs, and adding new features will palliate, not cure, them.

The further posts on the thread corroborate my point:

Kevin Chalmers wrote:
>Im estimating that a running thread in .NET needs about
> 1 Megabyte of memory, hardly lightweight.  This gives
> you around a maximum of around 2000 threads in a
> Windows XP 32-Bit machine.  I doubt an OO program with
> only 2000 objects is desirable in this respect.

neil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> There is an MSDN blog post that I found while researching
> my CPA 2006 paper...
> http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/07/29/444912.aspx
> I'm told the author (Raymond Chen) is a well-respected
> Microsoft techie, but as often when people from other
> schools of CS consider threading, it is frustrating reading.
> "Why are you creating so many threads that this even becomes
> an issue?" he asks.

I wish we could get the attention of DARPA or someone... it ought to be
obvious even to a concurrency newbie that there is something horribly
wrong with this picture and the baggage it implies.

Larry Dickson

Andrew Delin wrote:
> I am inclined to email the TechEd presenter and suggest that
> three new primitives -- ALTernation, CHANnel, and PARallel -- would be a
huge step in the right direction. These remove the thread plumbing and
semaphore wiring concerns, and put the programmer in a space where they
start to think about parallel design proper.
>
> I find all of this doubly ironic because Microsoft Research is working
on several initiatives in the field of parallel languages. And they
employ Tony Hoare, inventor of CSP...
>
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> -AD
>
>
>
> Andrew Delin
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> Microsoft Consulting Services
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> http://blogs.msdn.com/andrewdelin <http://blogs.msdn.com/andrewdelin>
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