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.

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