> Parallel programming is not hard if you follow the "just use a mutex and you avoid race conditions" mantra.

At one extreme of the spectrum, you can do everything under a big lock and be effectively single-threaded. At the other extreme, you can use lots of mutexes and fine grained locking and end up with a mess of potential deadlocks and races and "here be dragons" because the original programmer did not anticipate that you sometimes need data not to change for a bit longer than a short and obvious critical section.

What I'm working on at work right now, oh goodness how many races and problems I've found around locking and multi-threading in general. It's a nightmare.