concurrency

When Go was announced in 2009, many programmers read “concurrent language” as “parallel language”, ran their programs on more cores, watched them get slower and decided Go was broken. Rob Pike gave this 31-minute talk at Heroku’s Waza conference in January 2012 to correct the mistake. He thought the problem was the programmers’ mental model, not the language. The talk is a classic because its central distinction still gets confused in code reviews, and because the explanation is a cartoon about gophers burning manuals that’s hard to forget....

Weekly Paper Notes — the Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-08-08 CS paper digest. Area: Programming Languages / Concurrency (rotating away from a long run of distributed-systems picks). Author: C. A. R. Hoare (Queen’s University, Belfast) Published: Communications of the ACM, Vol. 21, No. 8, August 1978, pp. 666–677 DOI: 10.1145/359576.359585 Why the paper still matters If you have written ch <- v in Go, spawned an Erlang process and sent it a message, wired up an actor in Akka, or reasoned about a Rust mpsc channel, you have been programming in a dialect of a language sketched in eleven pages of CACM in 1978....