Introduction to concurrency

The definition of concurrency can be described as follows:

As a programming paradigm, concurrent computing is a form of modular programming, namely factoring an overall computation into subcomputations that may be executed concurrently.                                                                                                                                – Wikipedia

As the definition says, concurrency is all about breaking the entire task into small parts and then executing them concurrently (there's a small difference between concurrent execution and parallel execution, which we will discuss shortly).

So, what does it mean to execute subcomputations concurrently? Let's look at a real-life example. Think of a situation where you're cooking a new dish at your home and you have three chores—bring the spices, cut the vegetables, and also marinate something. Now, if you're doing it all alone, you have to do them one by one, but if you have a family member at your...