Now, I preferred correction to downvoting, but I can easily see why others would choose downvoting.
It's probably just my age, as I started out online when most discussion forums lacked explicit voting mechanisms. Before social media came along, and "gamified" human conversation. Maybe it helps police trolls, but at the cost of encouraging group-think and excessive meme-referencing, and just making a lot of people more neurotic and insecure in general. Overall, I think that online discussion is worse than it was 15 years ago, due to the psychological effects of all the imaginary Internet points.
But anyhoo, at the time I saw this (45 minutes after my original comment), my comment had 25 votes and was the top-most thing on this page. More often than not, if you wait an hour, the crowd straightens out the impact of any early outliers.
> But anyhoo, at the time I saw this (45 minutes after my original comment), my comment had 25 votes and was the top-most thing on this page.
It was grayed out at the bottom of the page when I saw it.
Sometimes there is some really weird voting dynamic here and it would be interesting to know what goes on.
For a lack of a better word you can call it intellectual curiosity or something.
Many times it's because the user was just asking a question, or made what they thought was a perfectly reasonable comment.
HN is pretty horrible with voting etiquette.
And I'll still hold that this is acceptable curiosity.
Like dragonwriter said, having coroutines in your language or a fiber library is not close to the same thing as the language having a scheduler that maps those fibers onto native threads for you. Some of the languages mentioned can't even execute multiple threads on multiple cores in parallel.
A more accurate statement is: "python bytecode can't execute concurrently w/o something like multiprocessing". The key difference? You can do multithreaded I/O all day long, which is a pretty important use case of threading. You can also hand off work to C and release the GIL, although this isn't as common. Example: XML parsing, regex, numeric work.
FWIW all these gotchas are one of the reasons I love just having complete threading support built in to my language.
No this isn't any more accurate. Python bytecode does execute concurrently if you have multiple threads. It just doesn't execute in parallel.
> [Erlang] is a concurrent language – by that I mean that threads are part of the programming language, they do not belong to the operating system. That's really what's wrong with programming languages like Java and C++. It's threads aren't in the programming language, threads are something in the operating system – and they inherit all the problems that they have in the operating system. One of the problems is granularity of the memory management system. The memory management in the operating system protects whole pages of memory, so the smallest size that a thread can be is the smallest size of a page. That's actually too big.
> If you add more memory to your machine – you have the same number of bits that protects the memory so the granularity of the page tables goes up – you end up using say 64kB for a process you know running in a few hundred bytes.
With Erlang, there are threads running concurrently across multiple CPU's and a preemptive scheduler within each of those threads. This is all transparent through use of Erlang processes. Essentially, many concurrent schedulers managing hundreds of thousands of processes that start out at 0.5kb each. A JVM thread is 1024kb by comparison and a goroutine is 2kb.
You're getting legitimate concurrency with Erlang, as well as isolation. There are only so many things that a single CPU can do at the same time and that's where the scheduler becomes necessary. The scheduler also ensure that if you fire off 100,000 processes and one of them is CPU intensive that it can't hog the processor and preventing the others allocated to that processor from executing.
For example, I have to explicitly install 2.7 to be able to use Cocos2d-x build scripts.
Jython and IronPython are both limited to Python 2.x, ZipPy is WIP without a stable release.
Because for some people, it's not enough to think of others as misinformed, or not so well-spoken.
They need to be thought of as blundering idiots, and castigated accordingly.