[erlang-questions] Teaching Erlang as part of a paper -- advice sought

[Jim Larson]

In message <8C0499EA-478E-4995-814C-57B6E189FBD1@REDACTED> you write:
>Here there is a dispute between me and one of the other lecturers
>in the department, who will not be involved in this paper, at least
>not this year.  I want the students to start learning about
>concurrent programming in a language in which data races (at least
>data races not involving external resources) are simply impossible.
>He thinks they should (a) learn what a data race looks like the hard
>way early on and (b) learn not be be afraid of data races, because
>the low level locking code on x86-64 Linux apparently has a benign
>data race.

A data race can certainly be modeled in Erlang, even in a motivated
way, by implementing the equivalent of a mutable cell that responds
to a simple "get" and "set" protocol.  With more sophistication,
one could model subtle properties of multiprocessor cache memory,
e.g. by introducing an "optimization" to the above mutable cell in
a distributed Erlang instance by adding local cache processes.

This could give students a great understanding of concurrency that
will help them even when programming C++ or Java in the future -
the understanding that even simple memory accesses can be complicated,
but their behavior can be understood in terms of distributed events
and messages between them.

Jim