Re: [9fans] current state of thread programming

["Roman V. Shaposhnik" <rvs@sun.com>]

tlaronde@polynum.com wrote:
> On the same subject, this quote from Donald E. Knuth, Volume 4
> fascicle 0 (new addition to The Art of Computer Programming, published
> in may 2008)---Preface:
>
> 	"Furthermore, as in earlier volumes of this serie, I'm
> 	intentionnally concentrating almost entirely on _sequential_
> 	algorithms, even though computers are increasingly able to carry out
> 	activities in parallel. I'm unable to judge what ideas about
> 	parallelism are likely to be useful five or ten years from now, let
> 	alone fifty, so I happily leave such questions to others who are
> 	wiser than I. Sequential methods, by themselves, already test the
> 	limits of my own ability to discern what the artful programmers of
> 	tomorrow will want to know."
>
I believe this is the biggest point in all of the hype around
concurrency as the
next  programming paradigm: it is very hard to approach the algorithmic
side of it. And no, I'm not talking locking-hygiene, I'm talking design and
implementation  of  basic  (and no so basic ) algorithms.

Thanks,
Roman.