There once was a cottage in the middle of the forest of the parallel trees where there lived three philosophers that did nothing all day but eat and think. They were called Papa Bear, Mamma Bear and Baby Bear ( in that order ).
Now once in a while they would get into terrible fights because they all ate rice from a bowl in the middle of the table but Papa Bear was so cheap that there were only three chop-sticks for all of them! This morning had been one of those occasions, so they decided to take a walk in the forest to cool off a bit.
It so happened that very near that spot, a young hacker called "Deadlocks" ( maybe because her hair had no bounce... ) was wandering lost and alone. Little DL ( as her parents called her ) was from the big Structured City and could not find her way among the trees ( she had spent the whole summer at her grandparents' farm up in the OO mountains, but I'm afraid it didn't do her as much good as everyone had expected - I guess she would need more time for it to start to sink in ). I am sorry to say that DL was a nasty brat - almost impossible to get rid of. She always showed up at the most inconvenient times in places you would never expect.
The smell of the rice soon reached DL, and her empty tummy lead her sure and quick to the humble cottage. The door was bolted fast, but DL had been using windows a whole lot lately and got in easily enough. She saw at once that the table was too high for her to reach the food, so she jumped up on the largest of three chairs that were placed around the table. This huge chair had the letters CSP carved in it and obviously belonged to Papa Bear - he had left Occam's razor near it on the table ( he would use it to shave every day, except for the fact that bears don't shave ). DL still couldn't reach the rice, however, for this chair turned out to be so rigid that it hurt her back if she tried to lean over the table.
Not one to give up, DL dropped to the floor and climbed on the next chair, which belonged to Mama Bear ( for that is always the order, nobody knows why ). This chair, being fully asynchronous, turned out to be incredibly flexible so that DL could change its shape in any fashion she pleased. This made it very easy for her to grab two chopsticks and reach the bowl. Alas, it was not yet that she would still her hunger for as she stretched her arm the chair would change shape right under her so that she would miss the bowl and hit the hard table with her chopsticks or, sometimes, swerve madly and plunge her hand into the hot rice and get burned for her efforts.
This made DL remember the good times she had had at her cousin Linda's house. There they ate from a huge cauldron of tuples using thick plastic straws. No one ever worried about where the tuples came from - some cooks added more all the time. It didn't seem much at the time, but now she saw how it avoided all of the troubles she was now having. Back to the present, she tried to be more careful about how she shaped Mama Bear's async chair. A few more failures, however, convinced DL to hop off this chair and go around the table.
Much to her surprise, she saw nothing where she was sure that the last chair had been ( this was Baby Bear's ). Looking closely at the floor, she saw the seeds of a few kinds of trees she had seen in the forest. She stood puzzled for a few minutes and then it clicked! Could this chair be made of future objects? She closed her eyes and tried to act as if the seeds had already grown into tall trees and been chopped down to make a lovely chair. Sure enough, as soon as she reached out she felt the back of Baby Bear's high chair. Eyes still closed, she climbed it until she reached the table and was able to easily lean all the way to the bowl. "This is great!" she thought, "not as rigid as the first one nor as dangerous as the second one!"
Then she had a nice meal. Then the bears came home and *they* had a very nice meal.
Well... that is what they tell everyone. But I happen to know that little DL was way too quick for them and ran away to a distant land where she lives to this day in an underground cavern called "Embedded Control" where she writes real time programs that mostly work.
The moral of the story: many go around saying they have licked Deadlocks, but never believe one word of it!
Notes: This was written to amuse the people of the Tunes OS mailing list and is actually a very loose allegory for the development of the parallel programming model for Merlin. Not many people can be expected to understand the references that are made here, so the following notes will try to explain them. Of course, all jokes that must be explained are not funny, but the only thing I can do about that is to write less exotic parodies/allegories in the future.