The Transactional Memory / Garbage Collection Analogy:

The purpose of this article is not to rehash excellent but previously published examples where software transactions provide an enormous benefit (though for background they are briefly discussed), nor is it to add some more examples to the litany. Rather, it is to present a more general perspective that I have developed over the last two years. This perspective is summarized in a one-sentence analogy:
Transactional memory is to
shared-memory concurrency
as
garbage collection is to
memory management.

The prose style is excessively wordy for my taste, but the content is interesting, and the core idea is entirely compatible with my own opinions on the subject.