From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-07-20T22:48:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Beyond threads? Better concurrency methods?

Alex.Dalitz@nominet.org.uk wrote:
> "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@cesmail.net> wrote on 20/07/2006 05:08:35:
>
>
>   
>> Strangely enough, I don't recall ever seeing a *real* programming 
>> language, to be distinguished from academic ones, that ever handled 
>> parallelism in a manner other than as calls to run-time libraries. Ruby 
>> already has that.
>>
>> Well, actually, there was *one* ... Occam for the Transputer. Some 
>> companies actually built products around this, although they were not 
>> economically viable. Ruby seems to be too well established for it to 
>> suffer this unhappy fate.
>>     
>
> I spent some great years programming the Transputer in OCCAM commercially. 
> It would be good to see some ideas from CSP in Ruby...
>   
And I spent four terrible years at a company called Floating Point 
Systems that bet the farm on an Occam/Transputer hypercube and ended up 
becoming one of the Portland area's larger disemployers. To be fair, I 
liked the Transputer and Occam, but the guys with the big bags of 
nickels bought other stuff from other companies.

Anyhow, CSP is "old hat" -- this year's "silver bullet" is the 
PI-Calculus, a close relative of Hoare's CSP and a direct descendant of 
Milner's CCS. I like the PI-Calculus just as much as I liked CSP, Occam, 
Concurrent Pascal, CCS, Linda/Rinda and all the other theoretical 
computer science approaches. In my own field, performance engineering, I 
like the CCS derivative, Jane Hillston's PEPA. But what are the guys 
with the big bags of nickels buying?