concurrent javascript?
So before anybody else gets the idea; I don't think Concurrent JavaScript is possible without either using the subset of JavaScript that's just functions or modifying the JavaScript object model to not allow access to internal state. I'm not sure what else would have to be done to JS to make a version suitable for concurrency as I can't find any papers on Sequential Pascal, which is the subset of Pascal that was used to develop Concurrent Pascal. Why does this matter? I need the correlations between the two languages since it's the closest language out there to be retrofitted with concurrency constructs. Of course, you can access Java fields in an object and that leads to a lot of misery when you're programming with threads in Java.
Last night I was reading through Origins of Conucurrent Programming which is an interesting, but anemic, look at concurrent system development. Lots of people classify it as an Operating Systems book but I think there's as much of interest to a language designer in there as interest to an OS designer. Something's starting to tell me that those two groups of people aren't that far apart from each other. Maybe there's some zen there that's under-utilized?
# — 25 November, 2002