Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
Ayup, everybody thinks they understand parallelism and loose coupling at an intuitive level.
They do.
And everybody is *wrong*. Most people can't even follow a recipe and put different courses on a table in a timely way.
That's not parallelism. That's scheduling and concurrency.
Why does everybody think that they've got a handle on this when there are entire fields to train people to deal with this.
The simple cases are intuitive. Applying the intuition to the complex cases is difficult.
Just like in computers.
How about a professional kitchen? "Oh, I understand parallelism and loose coupling intuitively" will get a knife through your hand and a pan to the head.
You can trivially and easily explain parallelism and loose coupling in a professional kitchen. It's actually doing the *cooking* that way that's difficult. But if you don't already know how to cook *one* meal, telling someone about how a professional kitchen works isn't going to enlighten them.
Gee, take a look how much coordination is required to build something like the Big Dig or the Bay Bridge and tell me about "intuitive". There are entire course sequences about this in civil engineering.
So, you would start teaching civil engineering 101 by showing how to organize and manage and take bids on the Big Dig? That'll work out well.
Yeah, parallelism and loose coupling is so "intuitive" that interchangeable parts and the assembly line are considered to be major technological advances for society.
Sigh. Only programmers could be this arrogant and naive.
No. Sophisticated, complex parallelism and loose coupling is difficult, just like sophisticated complex parallelism and loose coupling in computer programming is difficult.
Telling someone to go do some work and come back when it's done, because I'm busy here? That's pretty f'ing intuitive.
-- Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST) -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
