I’ve seen lots of links to Herb Sutter‘s talk at PARC on concurrency. This is a great talk – I found it a little tough to make it through his paper on the topic, while the talk is a joy to experience, information-dense yet approachable. Some thoughts and notes:
- There weren’t very many people in the audience – I’d have loved to fill one of those empty chairs.
- He mentioned OO being invented decades ago… passed on the opportunity to mention that much of it happened right there at PARC.
- I looked at Erlang some months ago after Joel Reymont described his experienced with it. Erlang is worth looking at again, in depth.
- For those of us who make a living by staying on the front slope of the adoption curve, the time is now (or past…) to build systems that run as a large number of separate threads of execution, to learn to build and use abstractions over concurrency, to run operations on a clusters of multi-CPU, multi-core PCs, etc.
- We need to use languages that let us build new abstractions and new kinds of abstraction. With such a language, if I wanted something like Herb’s “once {}” construct on slide 17, I could add it.
Weiqi pointed out Herb’s double-checked-locking comments. I did in fact know that DCL was broken and is now fixed… but have generally sworn off its use anyway. Life is too short to worry about whether we’re sure the right JVM will be used for each block of code we write.
One nit I have to pick is that the PARC site offers only an “mms://” streaming link for the video… I worked for me this time, but in general I’ve had far better results with plain old HTTP downloads and local playback, particularly if I’m not able to watch all in one sititng.