Why not? A thread allows for two parts of the program to be running concurrently. Whether or not they run in parallel is orthogonal. Why don't you think they allow for concurrency?
So who's wrong here? The world leading academics behind Haskell, Scheme and Oz? The industrialists and pragmatists behind Java? Or little old you?
The reality is that threads were created only to allow for concurrency. They were then re-used to allow for parallelism when we had multi-processors and then multi-cores.
Edit: does this guy work at Google? Unbelieveable.
Did you read the fucking article? The application began as a simple CLI for executing JS, and had underscore as its standard library. So it was a CLI for underscore. Then they made it JSON focused.
"reactions like yours where women are challenged and questioned for seeking knowledge in the first place"
No, come on, that's grossly unfair.
I would never challenge or question a woman for seeking knowledge. I would never treat a woman any differently. You're implying that I'm doing something objectionable like those who grope or make sexist jokes.
I'm saying that I'm not interested in anyone's gender, and I don't think it should be a property of interest to anyone except for dating.
I think that saying "hey! you're a woman! this special event is just for you! there's the main event as well, which we'd love you to come to, but there's also this special one just for you" is offensive.
Perhaps I've missed some part of the community, or I don't attend the right (wrong?) conferences, but I've never seen anything that discourages women. The only possibility is that they see an existing low proportion of women and then conclude it's not for them. Well that's their loss and their prejudice.
I get defensive, if you want to call it that, because I think any attempt to specially encourage one involuntary group is patronising. If a individual woman doesn't want to attend then that's her business. You can't ask woman-kind why none of their group aren't attending because she has nothing to do with the rest of her group.
It's also the grouping that confuses me. You want more women in the community, and so you are encouraging someone to join your community based on an entirely irrelevant property. You only want them because of their gender. You look at them, and see a woman - just that one property. It's objectification, de-humanisation.
Or do you mean should we prevent women turning up? No we should not allow events that prevent women turning up. But if an event happens to have no women turn up, then so the fuck what?
Are you going to challenge woman-kind why they aren't going? Why would one woman know why every other woman didn't want to attend?
The problem is - should we follow this argument all the way? Do you precisely work out the proportion of people of every conceivable group in every team, and cause a fuss when it isn't right? If you don't, what is the reason for that? Why worry about some groups, but not others.
I genuinely think the main reason that people worry about gender, over any other groups, is that it's normally so clear what group people are a member of. And that's not a sound reason to do anything.
I also genuinely think that some men cause a fuss about proportion of women in tech groups, simply because they'd like to meet and be able to hit on more women.
I think that's totally illogical. How many members of your community are gay? Have red hair? Are left handed. You have no idea, and you wouldn't recruit based on those characteristics. So why recruit based on gender?
I don't understand why the gender of a programmer is relevant to anything. You are concerned that there are no enough women. Why? Why do you want more women? Why is the particular sexual organs that someone has of interest to you?
This approach didn't work for Slashdot, Digg and Reddit, which are all fallen civilisations. If we don't try anything new to solve the problem, this civilisation will fall as well.