this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Programmer Humor
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In case you are serious: It's probably not.
When you're not careful with parallel processing / multithreading, you can run into something called a "race condition", where results of parallel computations end up in the wrong order because some were finished faster than others.
The joke here is that whoever "programmed" this commic is bad at parallel progmming and got the bubbles in the wrong order because of that.
The image makes perfect sense if you read it in the order 3, 1, 2.
Apart from the fact that bubble 1 and 2 point to the wrong person.
I think that’s part of the joke too. Like the whole comic has been written out of order due to race conditions; rather than just the father represents race conditions.
It’s one degree of humour too far though, if that’s the case, doesn’t really land.
It definitely landed for me. The aspect of one thread coming out of a totally different routine for no reason was extra funny.
Yes, if you reorder only the text and not the whole bubble it's also correct. =)
Oooh. Thanks for that, makes more sense now.
OH!
I was assuming the joke was that 1 and 3 got swapped around. Because it doesn't really make sense for 2 to be mixed up, considering it's from a different person entirely...
Which meant that the joke just made no sense, because swapping 1 and 3 is just as nonsense as the original order.
🤦🏽♀️ Thanks for explaining, my brain must have corrected the race condition.
Regarding threads: I have had good experience with using thread safe queues everywhere to exchange data between threads, it's the right tool in many cases, but I doubt queues to be useful when coding for performance.
lol your operating system is using queues and buffers with multiple threads everywhere.
Correct, and your point is?
My point is you don’t need to doubt the usefulness of queues for performance.
Umm, queueing is standard practice particularly when a task is performance intensive and needs limited resources.
Basically any programming language using any kind of asynchronous runtime is using queues in their scheduler, as well.
Could be I was not clear when I wrote performance, I am talking about High Performance Computing, where you want to spend all CPU cycles on solving your problem. While taking Amdal's Law into account. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
Ah gotcha, fair enough. Definitely depends on the workload. If you have compute you want to dedicate to solely to a single task, have at it.