Seven Languages in Seven Weeks

Concurrency

A repeated theme in this book is the need for better language constructs and programming models to handle concurrency. Across the languages, the approaches were often strikingly different but extremely effective. Let’s walk through some of the approaches we saw.

Controlling Mutable State

By far, the most common theme in the concurrency discussion was the programming model. Object-oriented programming allows side effects and mutable state. Taken together, programs got much more complicated. When you mix in multiple threads and processes, the complexity got too great to manage.

The functional programming language adds structure through an important rule. Multiple invocations of the same function lead to the same result. Variables ...