Re: [TUHS] PDP-11 legacy, C, and modern architectures

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 05:16:56PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> 
> 
> On 6/26/2018 3:01 PM, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> >I???m not sure I buy his arguments.
> I was going to say it was total and complete BS, at least based on the
> quoted statement in the initial email. But I decided not to send it. ;)
> 
> I wrote a POSIX thread based queuing system a few years back that could
> handle thousands of threads on a dual processor SPARC-10 before it just
> completely locked up Solaris (I think 9). It was targeted at larger systems,
> and it could easily scale as far as I wanted it to.
> 
> While you could argue that pthreads are not "C", the language was quite
> happy doing what I asked of it.

So I agree, had the same initial reaction.  But I read the paper a 
second time and the point about Fortran, all these years later, still
being a thing resonated.  The hardware guys stand on their heads to
give us coherent caches.  

> Sometimes, I wonder... Programmers are supposed to be smarter than the
> language. Not the other way around.

That's a great quote.  But I do sort of grudgingly see the author's 
point of view, at least somewhat.

--lm