Temporal Paradoxes: Multitasking at Its Finest

Published: 2023-08-31

When computing started, it was relatively easy to reason about things as a single series of computations. It didn't take long, though, before we introduced the ability to compute more than one thing at a time. These days, we take for granted computers' ability to multitask. We know that it's because we have multiple cores, CPUs, and servers. Yet somehow, "single-threaded" things like JavaScript and Python are also able to "do more than one thing at a time." How? There are two different concepts at play here, often at the same time, often confused, yet entirely distinct: Parallelism and Concurrency.

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