• doughless@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    A comment on the YouTube video makes a good point that we already have a better word for the concept of dealing with multiple things at once: multitasking. Using a word that literally means “things happening at the same time” just adds to the confusion, since people already have a difficult time understanding the distinction between multitasking and concurrency.

    • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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      9 months ago

      Yeah it always bothered me that they’re saying “concurrency is not concurrency”.

      I’m going to start using “multitasking” instead. That’s so much better. Who’s with me?

      • doughless@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I will typically use the terms asynchronous and parallel when discussing the concepts, but I hadn’t thought about using multitasking until I saw that comment. I mean, even C# calls them “tasks”.

    • lysdexic@programming.devOP
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      9 months ago

      A comment on the YouTube video makes a good point that we already have a better word for the concept of dealing with multiple things at once: multitasking.

      I don’t think that’s a good comment at all. In fact, it ignores fundamental traits that separate both concepts. For example, the concept of multitasking is tied to single-threaded task switching whereas concurrency has a much broader meaning, which covers multi threaded and multiprocess execution of many tasks that may or may not yield or be assigned to different cores, processors, or even nodes.

      Meaning, concurrency has a much broader meaning that goes well beyond “doing many things at once”. Such as parallelism and asynchronous programming.