> I replied directly to you
My comment was responding only to the person who equated threads and async. My comment only said that async and threading are completely orthogonal, even though they are often conflated
> `is_something_true` is very simple, if condition is true, and then inside the block, if you were to check again it can be false, something that can't happen in synchronous code
It can happen in synchronous code, but even if it couldn't - why is async/await the problem here? what is your alternative to async/await to express concurrency?
Here are the ways it can happen:
1. it can happen with fibers, coroutines, threads, callbacks, promises, any other expression of concurrency (parallel or not!). I don't understand why async/await specifically is to blame here.
2. Even without concurrency, you can mutate state to make the value of is_something_true() change.
3. is_something_true might be a blocking call to some OS resource, file, etc - e.g. the classic `if (file_exists(f)) open(f)` bug.
I am neutral on async/await, but your example isn't a very good argument against it
Seemingly nobody ever has any good arguments against it
> async-await pollutes the code completely if you're not strict about its usage
This is a good thing, if a function is async then it does something that won't complete after the function call. I don't understand this argument about 'coloured functions' polluting code. if a function at the bottom of your callstack needs to do something and wait on it, then you need to wait on it for all functions above.
If the alternative is just 'spin up an OS thread' or 'spin up a fiber' so that the function at the bottom of the callstack can block - that's exactly the same as before, you're just lying to yourself about your code. Guess what - you can achieve the same thing by putting 'await' before every function call
Perhaps you have convinced me that async/await is great after all!
My comment was responding only to the person who equated threads and async. My comment only said that async and threading are completely orthogonal, even though they are often conflated
> `is_something_true` is very simple, if condition is true, and then inside the block, if you were to check again it can be false, something that can't happen in synchronous code
It can happen in synchronous code, but even if it couldn't - why is async/await the problem here? what is your alternative to async/await to express concurrency?
Here are the ways it can happen:
1. it can happen with fibers, coroutines, threads, callbacks, promises, any other expression of concurrency (parallel or not!). I don't understand why async/await specifically is to blame here.
2. Even without concurrency, you can mutate state to make the value of is_something_true() change.
3. is_something_true might be a blocking call to some OS resource, file, etc - e.g. the classic `if (file_exists(f)) open(f)` bug.
I am neutral on async/await, but your example isn't a very good argument against it
Seemingly nobody ever has any good arguments against it
> async-await pollutes the code completely if you're not strict about its usage
This is a good thing, if a function is async then it does something that won't complete after the function call. I don't understand this argument about 'coloured functions' polluting code. if a function at the bottom of your callstack needs to do something and wait on it, then you need to wait on it for all functions above.
If the alternative is just 'spin up an OS thread' or 'spin up a fiber' so that the function at the bottom of the callstack can block - that's exactly the same as before, you're just lying to yourself about your code. Guess what - you can achieve the same thing by putting 'await' before every function call
Perhaps you have convinced me that async/await is great after all!