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The select() loop has been a core part of unix since before many people here were born. That's the basis of async, evented IO—it's hard to call that a fad.

Perhaps the callback mechanism of Node is a fad—continuation based techniques can make async code look like non-async code. Perl's Coro and Ruby's new(ish) fibers are examples of how that could look.

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what I meant is whether it's a fad to spread async everywhere inside application code, and call that a good thing. the computer is of course async in nature; but the abstraction on the app layer does not have to be.

> the computer is of course async in nature; but the abstraction on the app layer does not have to be.

Aren't computers actually synchronous? The abstraction on the OS layer is what makes computers async.

At the programming-language layer, async means you can write programs based on how the user and your program interact with each other. Other applications (and the OS itself) behave asynchronously too. Why make it harder?

Of course it shouldn't have to be that way (it didn't use to be), but it's very convenient to think around "what is actually happening" instead of "what the synchronous execution of the program is doing".

EDIT: but now I've seen you only meant a specific subset of async. I'm leaving the comment here anyways.

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