On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 7:09 AM, Michael van der Gulik <mikevdg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It's not *that* hard to write a large, scalable, concurrent systems using
> Processes and Semaphores. Sure, at times it can be difficult with horrible
> bugs that take a decade to manifest, but if you use consistent patterns and
> encapsulate complex behaviour well, it is quite tractable.

This is the second time I've seen you express this opinion.  It is
irrelevant whether *you* think it's easy/tractable/etc. or not.  The
empirical data is in: it's really really hard to do.  And languages
like Erlang show it is entirely too complex for no real gain.

People were (and still are I'm sure) expressing this same thing with
manual memory management.  "Oh, it's not that hard, these guys just
don't use the right technique/are lazy/etc" and it that's just not the
case.  The fact is, with both MM and concurrency, both of these models
ruin composability.  That's the point.