Edward Lee on Deterministic Concurrency

This is a really great talk. I hope Dana Scott gets to hear about this fixpoint model. Also the questions from the programming language semantics angle are very interesting. His answer is basically "Don't write programs like that!" See his book Deterministic Concurrency.

It's the first talk in this session. See ICFP 2026.

Before I listened to this talk I was thinking about what sort of a world it would be if we had tools where we could use synthetic mathematics to build languages (syntax and operational semantics) with certain abstract properties defined by Lawvere semantics. You would be able to compose different notions and factor out sublanguages which are well-behaved according to the functorial semantics. In this somewhere there is surely a kind of algebra of languages. For some reason though, people think it is better to develop separation logic and stuff to "reason" about any old garbage that somebody might try to write, and the people who make the hardware design hardware that must be able to run the sort of garbage that people write, and do it fast, so we end up with multi-core processors with weak memory cache semantics and MIMD and God knows what else to deal with. But it's all industry, and it makes money so whey hey! Jobs for the boys. But who the hell wants that kind of job? Really? Nobody does! So we use LLM chatbots to do the coding, and generate even more shit even faster, and we hang on to this crap, because it costs a lot to generate and debug. So now we need nuclear power stations just to write code. And to keep the bullshit economy afloat in the mean time we have to invent reasons to start wars. We're not a stupid bunch of fucking monkeys, were far worse!

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