alt Hacker NewsIt's kind of true...
I can do a lot of things asynchronously. Like, I'm running the dishwasher AND the washing machine for laundry at the same time. I consider those things not occurring at "the same time" as they're independent of one another. If I stood and watched one finish before starting the other, they'd be a kind of synchronous situation.
But, I also "don't care". I think of things being organized concurrently by the fact that I've got an outermost orchestration of asynchronous tasks. There's a kind of governance of independent processes, and my outermost thread is what turns the asynchronous into the concurrent.
Put another way. I don't give a hoot what's going on with your appliances in your house. In a sense they're not synchronized with my schedule, so they're asynchronous, but not so much "concurrent".
So I think of "concurrency" as "organized asynchronous processes".
Does that make sense?
Ah, also neither asynchronous nor concurrent mean they're happening at the same time... That's parallelism, and not the same thing as either one.
Ok, now I'll read the article lol
Replies
> I consider those things not occurring at "the same time" as they're independent of one another.
What would it take for you to consider them as running at the same time then?
I think asynchronous as meaning out-of-sync, implies that there needs to be synchronicity between the two tasks.
In that case, asynchronous just means the state that two or more tasks that should be synchronized in some capacity for the whole behavior to be as desired, is not properly in-sync, it's out-of-sync.
Then I feel there can be many cause of asynchronous behavior, you can be out-of-sync due to concurent execution or due to parallel execution, or due to buggy synchronization, etc.
And because of that, I consider asynchronous programming as the mechanisms that one can leverage to synchronize asynchronous behavior.
But I guess you could also think of asynchronous as doesn't need to be synchronized.
Also haven't read the article yet lol