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Comment by Roboprog | Hacker News Reader

The source of the article, Sun, is interesting.

I guess the author knew what was about to be foisted upon the world.

Kudos for trying to warn us.

(I remember reading Novell and OS/2 documentation in the late 80s / early 90s about threads and recoiling in horror. Of course, all real men must use threads, cuz they’re faster, even if stupefyingly dangerous)

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The author is John Osterhout, a CS professor. He was working at Sunlabs at the time. It's not like some unknown lone voice from the bowels of Sun was 'trying to warn us'. Warn us about what, anyway?

There was a hype wave about multithreading (hey BeOS) that started around 1995.

BeOS was pretty good, and now that i'm wiser in the tooth, they were basically implementing the Actor model, except since it was in C++, it was really hard to guarantee that the programmers wouldn't do stupid things with shared state.

“Threads are a bad idea” I believe is the warning.

And Sun was busy rolling out a certain now popular language with threading baked in around 1995.

I’ve had to fix other people’s servlet thread crosstalk bugs a few times. Wish “modern” (???) web apps used a different architecture...

John Ousterhout is the inventor of the Tcl language.

And co-author of the Raft consensus algorithm! [1]

[1] https://raft.github.io/raft.pdf

And Tcl had since the beginning an event loop naturally embedded in the core language. http://wiki.tcl.tk/2567 http://wiki.tcl.tk/1527

Which includes Tk, notable for being a relatively-easy-to-use GUI toolkit that embraces events as described in these slides.

(You probably already know this; just elaborating for those who might not be familiar with Tcl/Tk)

I’ve not used tcl/tk since around 2000, but it was a nice thing to quickly code up some dialog boxes for operations oriented scripts back in the day.

He also has a new book "A Philosophy of Software Design" that is short and worth reading. (I'm currently on chapter 7.)

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