[PRL] "Threads Considered Harmful" in the news

[Matthias Felleisen]

I am pretty sure that OReilly has an explicit policy against  
publishing anything concerning parenthetical languages. -- Matthias


On Jan 23, 2007, at 7:45 AM, Mitchell Wand wrote:

> This meme has now reached O'Reilly Radar, along with Erlang,  
> Haskell, and E.  Scheme needs to play in this space!!
>
> --Mitch
>
> http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/01/threads_conside.html
> Threads Considered Harmful
> By Nat Torkington on January 23, 2007
> Professor Edward A. Lee from the EECS department of UC Berkeley  
> wrote The Problem With Threads (PDF) last year. In it, he observes  
> that threads remove determinism and open the door to subtle yet  
> deadly bugs, and that while the problems were to some extent  
> manageable on single core systems, threads on multicore systems  
> will magnify the problems out of control. He suggests the only  
> solution is to stop bolting parallelism onto languages and  
> components--instead design new deterministically-composable  
> components and languages.
>
> This paper reflects two trends we see here at Radar: the first is  
> towards multicore systems and the growing importance of distributed  
> execution; the second is the increasing relevance of languages like  
> Erlang, Haskell , and E. The growth of multicore is significant: if  
> you want your program to run faster, the days of buying faster  
> hardware are coming to an end. Instead, we're looking at a time  
> when you must make your program run faster on more (slow) hardware.  
> Enter parallel programming, clusters, and their hyped big brother  
> "grid computing".
>
> Google have obviously faced this problem and solved it with  
> MapReduce. Lee argues that this kind of coordination system is how  
> we solve the problem of threads' nondeterminism. It nicely  
> parallels (heh) the way that database sharding has become the way  
> to solve scalability (see the Flickr war story for example). For  
> this reason we're watching Hadoop, the open source MapReduce  
> implementation, with interest. (There are also MapReduce  
> implementations in Perl, Ruby, and other languages)
>
> MapReduce is built on a technique from the Lisp programming  
> language. As the need for speed forces us out of our single core  
> procedural comfort zone, we're looking more and more at "niche"  
> programming languages for inspiration. Haskell has quite the  
> following among the alpha geeks we know (e.g., the Pugs project),  
> and OCaml has a small but growing group of devotees. Then there was  
> the huge interest in Smalltalk at Avi Bryant's OSCON talk last year  
> ( SitePoint blogged about it here).
>
> Tags: erlang google hadoop haskell languages mapreduce ocaml  
> parallel programming smalltalk threads
> _______________________________________________
> PRL mailing list
> PRL at lists.ccs.neu.edu
> https://lists.ccs.neu.edu/bin/listinfo/prl