Cherry-picking one bit out of a long post...

Maynard Handley (name99.delete@this.name99.org) on December 9, 2014 11:33 am wrote:
> Linus Torvalds (torvalds.delete@this.linux-foundation.org) on December 8, 2014 8:08
> There may well be severe limits to what we can do if we insist on writing every
> parallel program in K&R C with pthreads. But we are slowly fumbling our way to
> better abstractions. Blocks/lambdas/futures are still only a few years old, and
> where they have been retrofitted to existing languages the edges are still pretty
> obvious (horribly so in the case of C++, just ugly in the case of Objective C or C#).

I think you're grossly overstating the pace of progress here. Blocks/lambdas/futures are very, very, VERY old. Lambda calculus was contemporaneous with Shannon's MS thesis and therefore as old as the concept of digital computing, and they were added to Lisp in the 50s.

The fact that they are just now seeing mainstream use therefore constitutes extremely powerful evidence that progress on the language/algorithm front is agonizingly slow, i.e. exactly the opposite of what you claim.