Robert on "Understanding how Asynchronous Workflows Work"
Robert Pickering has just posted a nice blog entry showing how programs look if you don't have asynchronous workflows.
As Don Syme points out in his piece on asynchronous workflows, they are not about getting the whole of concurrency right but rather about getting asynchronous I/O right. I think that to fully appreciate the beauty of asynchronous workflows one must understand what it’s like to do asynchronous I/O without them. I think this may be true for many areas of software development, hell even good old C looks great if you’ve been forced to spend some time assembler, and I guess Joel and his law of “leaky abstractions” is saying something along a similar lines. So I guess the aim of this article is to make you think that workflows are great by show you the “assembler” of asynchronous programming, or at least the asynchronous I/O part of it.
...
