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A Science of Concurrent Programs [pdf]

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Re: A Science of Concurrent Programs [pdf]

#31
post #14

It's appropriate that this is appearing at the death of Niklaus_Wirth. He really was the first to get serious about formalizing concurrency. P and V, and all that. This feels very retro. I used to work on this sort of thing, but that was back in the early 1980s. This reads like something from back then, when people were first figuring out how to think about concurrency.[1] That's how people thought about this back th…

One person I rarely hear mentioned did similar work: Per Brinch Hansen. He built OS’s with Concurrent Pascal and Edison. His papers are below for those curious: http://brinch-hansen.net/papers/

First thing I see after opening a random paper[0]:

> Three decades ago, Dijkstra (1960) proposed the standard method of dynamic memory allocation for recursive procedures in block structured, sequential languages, such as Algol 60 (Naur 1963), Pascal (Wirth 1971) and C (Kernighan 1978).

Sheeesh, Dijkstra, can you please not show up everywhere like you're the Euler of computer science for FIVE MINUTES?!

Seriously though, that looks like a very interesting collection, will have to search through that in more detail later. Also curious about SuperPascal[1]. The first release/latest stable release column on the wiki page is kinda funny[2].

[0] http://brinch-hansen.net/papers/1995c.pdf

[1] http://brinch-hansen.net/papers/1994c.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperPascal

Re: A Science of Concurrent Programs [pdf]

#33
The thing that always confused me about concurrency and multithreading problems is the fact that books either are too practical(programming examples) or too theoretical(Lamport), they never have a good balance.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a good book? It should discuss CAS and how it's implemented on hardware level as a bare minimum.

Re: A Science of Concurrent Programs [pdf]

#34
post #6
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People often mistake software engineering, or IT with computer science. Those are not science.

Is computer science even science? It feels like we should have called ourselves computationally-applied mathematicians.

You are right. It should be called Computation.
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