Re:Ask HN: Why is concurrent programming so hard ?
by jacquesm on Monday August 17, 2009 @08:27PM
(#769451)
I see what you're getting at but I would call that unconscious thought. There is a great deal of that going on.
When you learn something it is conscious. Every bit of the activity that you are learning is new and requires lots of hard work. But at some points you have 'mastered' the skill, and you can do it 'without thinking', which is really just another way of saying that your unconscious has enough information to do the thinking without direction.
For instance, most of the people reading this are probably good typists (to me that's a part of 'hacking', the sound a typewriter keyboard would make when you 'hack' out a piece of text). All of us had to learn that skill at some point, one conscious and slow stroke at the time. But right now I'm typing this just a little slower than I can think it, or maybe even faster in spurts, depending on how frequently I've used those patterns.
If I tried to consciously think of every letter that I'm typing immediately I slow down to a crawl.
So we're good at parallel thought, no doubt about that, we multitask like we're made for it. But we have but one state of consciousness and we can not fork that even for the simplest of tasks.
Take chess players that can play on many boards. That's as close to human 'multitasking' as you can get when making a computer analogy. The state of each board is the thread of execution, the consciousness is doing 'multiple-instruction-single-data' across each board. On a 'task switch' (move to another player) the state gets reloaded and another move is produced.
If you could consciously think multiple threads then it should be much easier to play on many boards at the same time.
I wonder how well octopuses would perform at that task...
When you learn something it is conscious. Every bit of the activity that you are learning is new and requires lots of hard work. But at some points you have 'mastered' the skill, and you can do it 'without thinking', which is really just another way of saying that your unconscious has enough information to do the thinking without direction.
For instance, most of the people reading this are probably good typists (to me that's a part of 'hacking', the sound a typewriter keyboard would make when you 'hack' out a piece of text). All of us had to learn that skill at some point, one conscious and slow stroke at the time. But right now I'm typing this just a little slower than I can think it, or maybe even faster in spurts, depending on how frequently I've used those patterns.
If I tried to consciously think of every letter that I'm typing immediately I slow down to a crawl.
So we're good at parallel thought, no doubt about that, we multitask like we're made for it. But we have but one state of consciousness and we can not fork that even for the simplest of tasks.
Take chess players that can play on many boards. That's as close to human 'multitasking' as you can get when making a computer analogy. The state of each board is the thread of execution, the consciousness is doing 'multiple-instruction-single-data' across each board. On a 'task switch' (move to another player) the state gets reloaded and another move is produced.
If you could consciously think multiple threads then it should be much easier to play on many boards at the same time.
I wonder how well octopuses would perform at that task...