On: A brief interview with Tcl creator John Ousterhout

[hackandthink]

They talk only about Tcl.

A more lasting contribution:

Why Threads Are a Bad Idea (1995) [pdf] (gatech.edu)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17297325

[amelius → hackandthink]

Funny thing is that Ousterhout comes from the hardware design world, and in e g. VHDL, basically you have threads everywhere.

[nrclark → amelius]

I don’t think threads are really a concept that’s applicable to Verilog/VHDL.

Stuff operates in parallel in those languages, because you’re essentially describing little machines that all run independently of each other. You probably have some handoff from one machine to another. It’s more like Factorio and less like multi-threading.

[sitkack → nrclark]

Everyone is talking past each other here at different semantic levels.

From the old hn convo, which I agree with.

> Structured threads aren't that hard (e.g. task-based systems, thread pools).

> Unmaintanable raw-pthread messes are a nightmare sequel from the director of Endless GOTOs.

I think @Amelius is over generalizing on parallelism while Ousterhout is talking specifically about fine grain locking as a specific form of implementing parallelism.

[zeckalpha → amelius]

You have concurrency and parallelism everywhere but not threads.

[amelius → zeckalpha]

Hence "basically".