Fad Alert

With a subsection of the Ruby Fanboy crowd moving to Clojure, there is a lot of uninformed talk about Software Transactional Memory (STM), mostly regarding how it "solves" concurrency in a multiple core scenario and how it is very "intuitive".

Bryan Cantrill restores sanity to the discussion via his blog post, "Concurrency's Shysters"(Be sure to read the ACM paper he refers to in the post).

Unless you really understand the various concurrency mechanisms, to the point where you can implement some of them and know the theory therof, please please don't code concurrent programs. Thanks in advance.

PS: This is not a knock on Clojure itself. Rich Hickey, its creator, is extremely talented, dedicated and very knowledgeable. Clojure is a great piece of software. This post is a reaction to some uninformed enterprise developers' mumblings on how Clojure is the next bandwagon to jump on.

Book Treks

Working through every single exercise in a good technical book is a fascinating (and educational!) endeavour. Two of my friends are working through some tough technical books in this fashion (and blogging about it).

My friend Manoj wanted to take a break from writing J2EE code and so took a sabbatical to work through SICP. He is blogging his progress here. Another friend, Himanshu, is working through Van Roy and Haridi's "Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming" and is putting up the answers to the exercises here.