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Comment by crabapple | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how you can talk about concurrency without talking about locks

that is because you have slept through the entire revolution of share-nothing concurrency

I don't see how share nothing concurrency solves the "problem" of learning about locks. While locks in a share nothing concurrency architecture is not a problem, it is in other concurrency setups (you know, like threads?)

I think his point was that you don't need to learn about locks to learn about concurrency, which is a valid point. The problem with the point, at least as I see it, is that first year programming classes (at this point in time at least) do not teach languages that have concurrency models that really support it, nor do they eliminate the problem of synchronization by providing immutable data structures.

I, just this afternoon, heard Guy Blelloch give a talk about Parallel thinking today, and he seems to support the idea of teaching parallel programming throughout the curriculum almost instead of sequential programming--making sequential thinking the oddity. I think this makes sense, but it obviously has some flaws...

* do not teach languages that have concurrency models that really support it*

I don't know that I agree with that at all. My first college CS class taught Java, definitely supports concurrency. It's not Erlang-like concurrency, but concurrency nonetheless.

Theres a trend to start teaching Python as a first language, that supports it as well.

Please elaborate.

search "shared nothing concurrency"...read sutter's "the end of the free lunch"...

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