Threads Considered Harmful

LBR9 writes "James Reinders compares native threads with the goto statement so famously denounced 40 years ago by Edsger Dijkstra. Paraphrasing Dijkstra, he says they both 'make a mess of a program,' and then argues in favor of a higher level of abstraction. A couple of people commenting on the post question whether or not we should be even be treading into the 'swamp of parallelism,' echoing the view recently espoused by Donald Knuth."

Comments

No threads?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alright, then all responses to this article need to fall under this one post.

Not really news

[AKAImBatman]

Threads have been considered a "bad idea" by the CompSci profession for a little while now. So there is definitely nothing new about the author's statements. That being said, there is a fundamental difference between Dijkstra's paper 40 years ago and this summary: Dijkstra started his paper by holding up examples of better practices. Only after establishing their existence did he go on to suggest that the GOTO keyword was "too primitive" to be of practical use in software development.

The author of this "article" (and I use the term loosely) doesn't really present such options. He hand waves a few work-in-progress solutions at the end, compares threads to GOTO statements, then asks the readers to fill in the (rather sizable) blanks.

Long story short, it's a good topic of discussion, but the comparison to Dijkstra's famous paper is just an advertising point. Nothing more, nothing less.