RE: free lunch almost over

["Wall, Kevin" <Kevin.Wall () qwest com>]

Jeff Williams wrote...

> I think we're focused on different aspects of 'important.' 
> The sheer number of web applications does make concurrency
> in that environment an important issue for this list.
> Concurrency used to be the province of a relatively 
> small number of developers who understood that were working in a 
> multithreaded environment. Now the number of programmers who need to 
> understand concurrency is, well, almost all of them. That's 
> why the issue is important for the list (or at least to me).

Well, I agree completely with your assessment. In fact, the
author (Herb Sutter) more or less states this as well, when
he writes:

 "The vast majority of programmers today don't grok
 concurrency, just as the vast majority of programmers
 15 years ago didn't yet grok objects."

(Of course, I think Sutter is being overly generous here. If the
truth be told, most programmers _still_ don't grok objects. In
fact, about half don't even grok programming IMO! ;-)

There was an editorial article recently in one of the ACM publications
that I get (I think it may have been the _ACM Queue_) that somewhat
discussed this as a normal phenomena of our culture. Twenty plus years
ago, you didn't have everyone and their brother claiming to be
programmers
just because there was lots of money to be found in it. Then as things
got
easier (e.g., the compiler did more for you, the advent of higher level
programming languages, etc.) and the potential rewards went up (recall
the VC $$ in late '90s), anyone who happened to slap together a few
likes of
VB (ugh!) or construct a simple static HTML web page using some WYSIWYG
HTML editor went around claiming to be a "programmer". Unfortunately,
many of these people are still with us (i.e., in our profession) and
worse,
many are now our managers.

Welcome to the dumbing down of programming and it's inevitable results.

BTW, Richard Clarke seems to be one of the few that has the guts to
state
this publicly in a straightforward manner. (See .sig, below.)

-kevin
---
Kevin W. Wall  Qwest Information Technology, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: 614.215.4788
"The reason you have people breaking into your software all 
over the place is because your software sucks..."
 -- Former whitehouse cybersecurity advisor, Richard Clarke,
    at eWeek Security Summit