[erlang-questions] Re: Classification of concurrency patterns

[Geoffrey Biggs]

On 18/05/10 18:46, Joe Armstrong wrote:
> There's no point in expressing the concurrency in an algorithm if the
> hardware can't do it anyway
> (or perhaps there is?)

I believe there is. It may not be directly applicable to hardware now,
but it has a high chance of being applicable at some point in the
future. Just make sure it's *implementable* now, even if we don't get
all the benefits that having native hardware support would give, like
true concurrency.

The catch here is that your example of pmap breaking into different
sizes depending on the number of cores is the anti-thesis of what a
pattern should be. It's specifying implementation details. I think that
the patterns should be more abstract than "the task is split up 4 times"
- a better description is "the task is split up n times," with n
determined by the pattern user for their specific needs - hopefully
based on some benchmarking.

Geoff