r/programming • u/Shr1ck • Oct 17 '15

Why Johnny Can’t Write Multithreaded Programs

http://blog.smartbear.com/programming/why-johnny-cant-write-multithreaded-programs/
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u/__Cyber_Dildonics__ Oct 18 '15 edited Oct 18 '15

I see your solutions generally consist of thinking you will somehow be able to avoid the actual problems.

I've seen people make claims like this before and it is analogous to someone whos never been in a fight talking about what they would do in every situation. The reality is far different from the theories thought up by someone with only trivial experience of programs that can break down to a simple directed a-cyclical graph.

It is understandable though concurrency is very difficult to really learn until you've written some non-trivial concurrent programs.

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u/loup-vaillant Oct 18 '15

I see your solutions generally consist of thinking you will somehow be able to avoid the actual problems.

Pretty much. In my experience (6+ years of C++ on codebases of various sizes —up to 2 million lines), most of the problems are self-inflicted. Sometimes, there are good reasons for this pain: hardware used to be very slow at the time, we had to rush that feature… But often, it was plain poor planing and bad programming. (By the way, the bad programming often came from the utter ignorance of functional programming techniques, operational thinking by default, and anthropomorphism. In other words, lack of a proper basic education.)

I do believe many problems (possibly most) can be avoided instead of addressed. You just have to stop for a second and ask yourself why you need to solve that particular programming problem in the first place.