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    Before you try to understand the full program, make sure you understand the threads and how they interact, the synchronisation and the touchpoints between them. Once you have that skeleton, you can try to analyze each thread in what it's doing just like a separate program. That won't make the process much easier, but at least more structured. Commented Sep 29, 2016 at 10:42
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    Proponents of alternative approaches to concurrency and parallelism (e.g. STM, Actors, Dataflow) would probably say that if you feel that multithreading with shared mutable state and locks is a horrible complicated mess that makes your head explode and cannot be properly understood, then you have, in fact, fully understood multihreading with shared mutable state and locks ;-) Commented Sep 29, 2016 at 16:35
  • Piggy-backing on Jörg's comment, allow me to direct your attention towards an essay called On structured concurrency, Or: Go statement considered harmful and the various talks and blog posts by Ron Pressler about Project Loom. They agree with your assessment that concurrency as it is right now is too complicated for humans brains, similar to how programs with copious amounts of goto statements are too complicated, and they propose "structured concurrency" as a way out. Commented Nov 4, 2020 at 11:22
  • I'll add to write small programs to try to replicate the unexpected behavior. Try to create a race condition, see it happening, then try different approaches to solve it. You learn a lot about concurrency when you catch, find and solve bugs, but on a production environment the bugs are harder to happen and find. Commented Nov 4, 2020 at 23:28