• FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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    1 month ago

    You missed the point. He understands all these things you tried to explain. The point is that your definition of the word “concurrency” is objectively wrong.

    You:

    you seem to be doing multiple things at the same time. In reality they are run little by little one after another

    The actual meaning of the word “concurrency”:

    The property or an instance of being concurrent; something that happens at the same time as something else.

    Wiktionary actually even disagrees with your pedantic definition even in computing!

    (computer science, by extension) A property of systems where several processes execute at the same time.

    I suspect that concurrency and parallelism were actually used interchangeably until multicore became common, and then someone noticed the distinction (which is usually irrelevant) and said “aha! I’m going to decide that the words have this precise meaning” and nerds love pedantic "ackshewally"s so it became popular.

    • nous@programming.dev
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      1 month ago

      I suspect that concurrency was used back when there were only single threaded cpus, when process scheduling became a thing, to talk about the difference between running one process after another vs interleaving the processes so they appear to be concurrent. Then once true multithreaded programs became a thing they needed a new word to describe things happening at the exact same time instead of only appearing to.

    • FrostyPolicy@suppo.fi
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      1 month ago

      Wikpedia puts it nicely:

      "The concept of concurrent computing is frequently confused with the related but distinct concept of parallel computing,[3][4] although both can be described as “multiple processes executing during the same period of time”. In parallel computing, execution occurs at the same physical instant: for example, on separate processors of a multi-processor machine, with the goal of speeding up computations—parallel computing is impossible on a (one-core) single processor, as only one computation can occur at any instant (during any single clock cycle).[a] By contrast, concurrent computing consists of process lifetimes overlapping, but execution does not happen at the same instant. "

      • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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        1 month ago

        You’re still missing the point. We all understand that definition. We’re just saying that it is incorrect use of the word “concurrent”. Does that make sense? The word “concurrent” means things happening at the same time. It’s stupid for programmers to redefine it to mean things not happening at the same time.

        • Bear@lemmynsfw.com
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          1 month ago
          execution = if concurrency then parallelism else multitasking
          

          Simple. Easy. But it doesn’t confuse my boss or make everyone angry.

          concurrency = if concurrency then concurrency else concurrency 
          

          Now this I can work with.