From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:40:39 -0700 From: "Roman V. Shaposhnik" In-reply-to: <20080728175021.GA2030@polynum.com> To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Message-id: <488F6427.1050109@sun.com> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT References: <14ec7b180807281011k2ccffe12i5739998193c18024@mail.gmail.com> <20080728175021.GA2030@polynum.com> User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 (X11/20080310) Subject: Re: [9fans] current state of thread programming Topicbox-Message-UUID: f4589ff0-ead3-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 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.