[toopok4k3]

What, you don't breathe this magical glitter dust in and out every day?

I feel old reading these kind of blog posts that assume that we all know what the latest unicorn has been spewing out of its butt. It's like I'm missing out on the greatest debate. On dung.

I'm sure it's valuable debate for those in the know. But this is just how it translates to some of us.

[coldtea]

This is not about some unicorn company, or some far-fetched concept.

Async/await has been in the discussion for most popular languages (C# and JS first for the masses, Python, Rust, Java, and others) for a decade now.

And the colored functions analogy was a very popular post (and was subsequently referenced and discussed in lots of others).

Besides, HN is not some website about just knowing the core concepts used in the trade. There's Hacker Noon and others for that. HN has always been all about these kind of intra-group discussions.

[saurik]

Right: there is a decade of discussion about this one narrow instantiation of a feature that is itself a mere part the past fifty years of discussion of the general class of thing it is from--coroutines--and an infinite amount of academic material on both that concept and monads--which is the correct mental abstraction to have here--and so the idea that I must have read this one random recent blog post (one which I honestly had heard about it in passing, but without any belief that it was important to anyone or that there was even one specific one that mattered) that was written by someone who probably, ironically, hasn't read all of those actually-seminal papers is more than a bit frustrating.

(edit) Really, everyone should probably start by reading the 1978 papers "on the duality of operating system structures" and "communicating sequential processes", which, when combined with the appropriate background in the continuation passing style compiler transform (which I am pretty sure was also developed around the same time) could have hopefully prevented Ryan Dahl from accidentally causing the callback-hell "dark age" of software engineering from ever happening in the first place ;P.

https://cs.oberlin.edu/~ctaylor/classes/341F2012/lauer78.pdf

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Hoare78.pdf

[coldtea]

>that was written by someone who probably, ironically, hasn't read all of those actually-seminal papers is more than a bit frustrating.

For completeness and curiosity maybe. Otherwise one doesn't have to read the "actually-seminal papers" if they already know the concepts from the 40 to 20+ years that followed.

Do physicists need to read the original Einstein or Maxwell if they had read tomes of subsequent course and academic books on the subject, plus modern papers for the later developments?

In any case, I'm pretty sure the author of that post [1] had read at least the CSP papers -- he works on the Dart language team, and has written Game Programming Patterns and Crafting Interpreters, both quite popular books, which have been discussed (as in first page) more than 3-4 times in HN in the past years.

[1] https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-....

[saurik]

I would (and in fact kind of do) agree with you... but for the assumption that we have all read this one particular article; like, the premise here isn't that "this is the specific literature you must read", but "why assume I read that when there is so much less to have read? here is what I would have said you should have read, and I can't imagine you did!".

I guess maybe the issue in your comment is that my complex sentence with "is more than a bit frustrating" was mis-parsed, as you left off the direct referent of it and then seem to be arguing back at me with the same point I was trying to make with some emphatic irony (I was really hoping to provide three papers all from 1978, but there wasn't a perfect one on continuations)... to re-architect the center a bit:

> ...the idea that I must have read this one random recent blog post [--when I can't imagine this person has read the specific literature I think everyone should have read, as there was an infinite amount of it and a lot of it is equivalent to the rest: the only thing that makes this blog post exciting is almost certainly some kind of recency bias--] is more than a bit frustrating.