The Zen of Parallel Programming

I cannot make sense of a single word of this essay. What sort of insight am I missing? There's not a peep here about write barriers, futexes, OS schedulers, critical paths and/or how they relate to Zen or whatever. This article can be easily recycled as the Zen of compiler design or Zen of audio engineering or whatever, without substantially having to chance much of the words, thats how generic it is.

I'm genuinely considering that this is just a foreword and I missed the clickthrough link to the meat of the article.

Best quote over on distributed systems as applied to humans (from Dan Luu):

"Everything we've looked at so far is a technical problem. Compared to organizational problems, technical problems are straightforward. Distributed systems are considered hard because real systems might drop something like 0.1% of messages, corrupt an even smaller percentage of messages, and see latencies in the microsecond to millisecond range. When I talk to higher-ups and compare what they think they're saying to what my coworkers think they're saying, I find that the rate of lost messages is well over 50%, every message gets corrupted, and latency can be months or years"

- from https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

I try to find an embarrassingly parallel solution to most problems I encounter. Not only because such solutions scale, but because they often produce a simpler, more robust architecture which helps you to avoid future issues. It's great for avoiding single points of failure and performance chokepoints. Also, there is usually little to no overhead for choosing a parallelizable solution (besides a little bit of additional up-front thinking.)

To people who say "You don't need scalability" I say "You also don't need unscalability..."

It’s true that “zen of” is bolted onto many topics… it’s a tired cliche to suggest “simplicity” when things are complex. Does it help or is it faux spirituality?

I’ve enjoyed reading the comments here and I think there’s truth in how the technical problem is divided and teams are arranged. The idea of frequency of features (or builds) being a reflection of our division of the problem, is interesting. It made me think about our teams trying to ship releases and the problems arising, but zen and parallelism don’t give any hints. It’s just about effort to organise better, like it always was

Fred Brooks and the mythical man month observed that communication between people expands faster than linear, and that adding more people to a project makes it later.

Aside from the sentence "How many experiences continue to consume us because they were never allowed to finish burning?", I'm not sure what to make of this article. But the book it mentions, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind", seems worth taking a look at (an older one, not a promotion).

This resonates with me. On the one hand I feel like my team is spread too thin all the time, scope and complexity is just too broad - and at the same time I'm pretty sure nore headcount could only improve it to a certain degree.

I like the part about synchronization and honesty. And I'm certain every time I get annoyed that someone is not as open with me as I wish they were, there is a part in there that myself contributed to that.

CS101 Day 1: Learn about Divide and Conquer in depth. Honesty forms the ability for controlling signal strength, avoiding impedance mismatches or logically, synchronization between the divided slices.

Communication in this sense is pretty common in Mathematics and Computer Science and it becomes apparent when its related to actors and their interactions.

A good example is game theory and game semantics. The term "actor" in this context are soo abstract that we can pretty much attempt to implement them anywhere we see fit and that I think is the beauty.

I appreciate somebody trying to connect disparate concepts to give both some kind of fresh perspective; perfectly happy to entertain analogies that break down if you look at them too hard... but like somebody else said, this reads like a draft or a foreword. Also, what about any of this is "zen"? This goes nowhere and has no connection with the concepts put forward in the title. Chucking "the zen of" in front of anything for no reason was tired 10 years ago, yet people keep doing it. We get it, you've heard of the book.

Another parallel from the Western tradition: ‘homologia’, translated maybe best as congruence or coherence. A Greek Stoic concept of the mind/body/entire organism in alignment, caused by reason and feeling being in harmony.