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Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

Async computation is not the fad, it's poor syntax is.

C#, F# and coffeescript have excellent syntax that remove the line noise caused by writing async code. Actors and channels also nicely remove line noise from async programming.

If anything as computers become more powerful and distributed you'll see threads and locks disappear rather than async computation. Async computation in an imperative style is what most want, threads and locks are what we have.

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That is where I disagree completely. I think the old fashioned sync/blocking/threaded style is much easier than async.

Of course, C# has great async support; but it is still a complicate thing that programmers must be very cautious about when applying.

I don't think you've seen truly great async support, it's virtually indistinguishable from sync code.

Sync:

  let file = File.Open("foo.txt")
  let data = file.Read(8192)
  // Do some compute stuff with data

ASync:

  let! file = File.OpenAsync("foo.txt")
  let! data = file.ReadAsync(8192)  
  // Do some compute stuff with data

while the syntax can be as simple as that, there is still a difference, and the programmer still needs to be very careful. what if you accidentally forget the `"!"`?

Umm... it doesn't compile because it's the wrong type...

But yeah multithreading is easy.

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