[zhong-j-yu]

The single-event-thread design is not without its own problem; programmers have difficulty in understanding and abiding to it too.

Here we have an inherently concurrent problem - user actions and some IO actions occur concurrently. That problem cannot be reduced by some API or language trick.

[kaoD]

> The single-event-thread design is not without its own problem; programmers have difficulty in understanding and abiding to it too.

Definitely not my experience. jQuery is very popular among unskilled programmers because its async model is very easy to understand. I use it to teach async!

> That problem cannot be reduced by some API or language trick.

Why? Reducing problem by API or language tricks is exactly what abstraction is for.

[fleitz]

Given the Universal Turning Machine and the Church-Turing thesis in actuality all of programming except for assembler is pretty much some API or language trick.

[dllthomas]

Arguably, even machine language is "some API" and assembler "some language trick".

[fleitz]

Good point, I forgot for a second that the CPU turns assembler into microcode before executing it.

[dllthomas]

The CPU often turns machine code into microcode, true, and that's a good point but it wasn't the point I was trying to make. Even in simpler processors that actually do directly execute the machine code, I think you can view that machine code as an API for controlling the processor system.