Martin Sustrik
Karma: 807
NewTop
Announcement: A talk about structured concurrency at FOSDEM
I think it has to do with intellectual honesty. There’s a lot of highly intelligent people who are willing to accept the status quo, even if they are aware that it’s broken, and just move on with their life. Then there are some people who are just psychologically incapable of such “ignore it and move on” attitude. Interestingly, this applies across broad spectrum of disciplines.
Science: A former kind of person does all the steps from a scientific method textbook and move on with their research. The latter kind of person won’t be able to avoid thinking about why the method is as it is, whether its rationale matches their experiment, whether there are special circumstances that make the method inadequate and so on.
Engineering: The former type of person would just take existing tools and practices, glue them together and get a viable product. The latter kind of person will agonize over corner cases, whether there’s a fundamentally different way of doing the same thing, whether the design is internally consistent and so on.
Arts: The former type of person is a mannerist. They use the existing expressive repertoire of their time and use it to create viable art. The latter kind of person cannot avoid seeing the problems with the current style, trying different ways of addressing them, getting back to basics and so on. Think van Gogh, for example.
Does that matter that much? The life had to originate somewhere and it, presumably, must have faced the same coordination problems along the way.
Yes, I own the book. However, I am not a biologist, so writing about the topic is hard for me. By focusing fully on the original book I have a reliable lead. If I had to compile from multiple sources, it would be much easier for me to go astray.
Anyway, if you’d like to write about the new developments, I would love to link that from this article.
State Machines and the Strange Case of Mutating API
“Can you just straighten out the yellow one without touching any of the others? Thanks.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve#Evidence_of_evolution
Some more examples here: https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-lava-layer-anti-pattern.html
Equivalence of State Machines and Coroutines
On Rigorous Error Handling
Good point. I shall edit the article to make that clear.
There’s an eerie similarity between an old software project and a inner working of a living organism. You see all these pieces that were serving some purpose in the past, then they were abandoned and repurposed, the changes are layered one on top of another without removing the vestiges of the old design first and so on.
I’ve written a small essay on the topic once: http://250bpm.com/blog:51
Two Approaches to Structured Concurrency
Unikernels: No Longer an Academic Exercise
Fair point!
It’s just like replacing goto with while/for/if back in 60′s. Not a big deal technically. Big deal in the terms of abstraction. Also, don’t think about about OS threads. Every time there’s a state machine somewhere it’s just a green thread in disguise.
Update on Structured Concurrency
Nice idea. Maybe all the tokens should start in the pool and the players should have an option to withdraw them. I guess that would make people feel more explicitly “anti-social” if they did so.
Thanks for fixing that!
I had reposting from my site turned on recently. But this article haven’t made it through (maybe because it contained tables?) So I’ve posted it by hand. Then the reposting pipeline caught up and posted it again. I would delete one of the two but there seems to be no delete button.
Funny that I had exactly the same thought when writing the comment above: Isn’t that just OCD? But if you look at concrete examples, it doesn’t feel like that. Einstein? Incapable of accepting easy solutions? Yes. OCD? Probably not. Even van Gogh, despite the host of psychological problems, probably haven’t had OCD.