Insecure parallelism with Java?

[Roy Wilson]

Hi,
    I apologize in advance for posting "philosophy" on this site. Having said that
...
    I recently came across a paper in the April 1999 issue of the ACM SIGPLAN
Notices. In it, after claiming priority of invention in connection with monitors,
Per Brinch Hansen says the following: "The claim that Java supports monitors is
shown to be false". As a result, he says, "parallel threads can access shared
variables, either directly or indirectly, without any synchronization". Somewhat
(?!?) provocatively, he finishes up with the following: "It is astounding to me that
Java's insecure parallelism is taken seriously by the programming community .... It
has no merit." Pretty strong stuff, eh?
    As I am writing an application that centres on Java concurrency, I'm interested
in what experts of various types make of this, especially those involved in building
JVMs.

Roy Wilson
designrw at bellatlantic.net