Re: First class developer: who ?
Arved Sandstrom wrote:
....
I still believe that programmers who are finding that writing concurrent
code is really, really hard probably find most other kinds of coding
pretty difficult too. In my experience most programmers who are having
problems reasoning about what their code may or may not do in a
concurrent situation don't fully understand what their code is doing in
a single-threaded environment, nor do they adequately understand the
concurrency capabilities of their language.
....
There may be a lot of people who find programming difficult regardless
of concurrency, and even a few people like you who find concurrent
programming easy, but there are definitely programmers who find
concurrent programming harder than single thread. I'm one of them.
If that is due to inherent incompetence as a programmer, it's a bit late
to find out, after working as a programmer and computer architect from
1970 through 2002. I don't think it is due to any lack of understanding
of concurrency. Several of the computer design patents on which I'm an
inventor involve concurrency issues. I've debugged cache coherence in
multiprocessor server prototypes.
I still remember my delight when I switched from multiprocessor
operating systems to compilers for a while in the 1980's, and got to
work on something that ran the same way *every* time it ran with the
same inputs. I could even stop the compiler at a break point, spend half
an hour contemplating its state, tell it to continue, and it did exactly
what it would have done without the break point. Sheer luxury.
Patricia