The author is John Osterhout, a CS professor. He was working at Sunlabs at the time. It's not like some unknown lone voice from the bowels of Sun was 'trying to warn us'. Warn us about what, anyway?
There was a hype wave about multithreading (hey BeOS) that started around 1995.
Re:Why Threads Are a Bad Idea (1995) [pdf]
by dnautics on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @06:08PM
(#17298523)
BeOS was pretty good, and now that i'm wiser in the tooth, they were basically implementing the Actor model, except since it was in C++, it was really hard to guarantee that the programmers wouldn't do stupid things with shared state.
Re:Why Threads Are a Bad Idea (1995) [pdf]
by Roboprog on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @11:33PM
(#17309069)
“Threads are a bad idea” I believe is the warning.
And Sun was busy rolling out a certain now popular language with threading baked in around 1995.
I’ve had to fix other people’s servlet thread crosstalk bugs a few times. Wish “modern” (???) web apps used a different architecture...
John Ousterhout is the inventor of the Tcl language.
Re:Why Threads Are a Bad Idea (1995) [pdf]
by ryanworl on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @05:20PM
(#17298139)
And co-author of the Raft consensus algorithm! [1]
And Tcl had since the beginning an event loop naturally embedded in the core language.
http://wiki.tcl.tk/2567
http://wiki.tcl.tk/1527
Re:Why Threads Are a Bad Idea (1995) [pdf]
by yellowapple on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @09:19PM
(#17299507)
Which includes Tk, notable for being a relatively-easy-to-use GUI toolkit that embraces events as described in these slides.
(You probably already know this; just elaborating for those who might not be familiar with Tcl/Tk)
I guess the author knew what was about to be foisted upon the world.
Kudos for trying to warn us.
(I remember reading Novell and OS/2 documentation in the late 80s / early 90s about threads and recoiling in horror. Of course, all real men must use threads, cuz they’re faster, even if stupefyingly dangerous)