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The Problem With ThreadsLee, E.A., "The Problem With Threads", IEEE Computer, vol. 36, no. 5, May 2006, pp. 33-42, available online as U.C. Berkeley EECS Department Technical Report UCB/EECS-2006-1
Many of the points about concurrency raised in this article will be familiar to LtU readers, particularly those who have any familiarity with CTM, but the article does provide a good summary of the issues. Beyond that, what I found interesting (especially from a PLT perspective) is Lee's contention that the emphasis on developing general-purpose languages that support concurrency is misplaced. Lee believes that a better approach is to develop what he calls "coordination languages", which focus on arranging sequential components written in conventional languages into some concurrent configuration (I suppose that piping in a Unix shell could be considered a limited coordination language). Quoting from the article:
It's not immediately obvious to me that there's anything preventing a "coordination language" from being a well-defined subset of some more general language. Lee's key point seems to involve making coordination constructs syntactically distinct (e.g. block diagrams vs. text). Which, of course, raises some interesting questions about whether other important facets of a language (such as the language of type declarations) should also have strongly syntactically-distinct representations, and just how homogeneous (Lisp anyone?) the syntax of a language should be... By Allan McInnes at 2006-05-14 23:47 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 24107 reads
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