[erlang-questions] How to Name Concurrency Patterns

[Joe Armstrong]

Very Nice

More like this please.

/Joe

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 11:08 PM, Dmitry Kolesnikov
<dmkolesnikov@REDACTED>wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Long time ago, I was looking into async message queue patters.
> I found namomsg tutorial is very nice it depicts most common patterns
> http://tim.dysinger.net/posts/2013-09-16-getting-started-with-nanomsg.html
>
>
>
> Best Regards,
> Dmitry
> >-|-|-(*>
>
> > On 19 Feb 2014, at 23:14, Joe Armstrong <erlang@REDACTED> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > Hello, I'm giving a course in distributed and parallel programming in
> > Erlang ...
> >
> > Next week I'll be talking about common concurrency patterns, I was
> > talking with the course adviser, and I rattled off the names of a few
> > concurrency patterns that were well-known and easy to explain. I said
> > I'll do PUB-SUB, pipeline, map-reduce, parallel map, and so on.
> >
> > At this stage the course adviser said that a) things like PUB-SUB
> > would not be familiar to the students and that b) It would take more
> > than 5-10 minutes to explain PUB_SUB.
> >
> > At this stage I thought "pity these patterns don't have well-known
> > names".
> >
> > What I'd like is to make a catalog of "well-known" concurrency
> > patterns.  I'd like to name them, and describe them informally, and
> > give the example code in Erlang.
> >
> > For example, here's how I might describe PUB-SUB.
> >
> > == PUB-SUB
> >
> >    - There are a number of named channels
> >    - You can post messages to a channel ie Publish the message (the PUB)
> >    - You can subscribe to a channel (The SUB)
> >    - If you are currently subscribed to a channel you will be sent all
> messages
> >      sent to the channel.
> >
> > A rudimentary version of this is about 25 lines of Erlang. A full
> > version with load balancing, removing bottlenecks etc. would be a lot
> > longer, but that's not the point. The basic concurrent structure can
> > be explained in a few lines and named.
> >
> >
> > Pipeline is another example: The output of the first process is the
> > input to the next process and so on...
> >
> > Now I start having problems.
> >
> > Suppose I want to generalize a regular map.
> >
> > To be precise. Suppose map(F, L) means [F(I) || I <- L]
> >
> > pmap(F, L) is parallel map (easy) all the F(I)'s are computed
> concurrently.
> >
> > pmap(F, L, Max) behaves like map(F,L) with at most Max F(I)'s computed
> concurrently.
> >
> > What should this be called? "Pool of workers"
> >
> > There seem to be things with well-known names "Load-balancer"
> "map-reduce" etc.
> >
> > Then there are things that we know of but that are not named. For
> > example my DNS resolver has two DNS names DNS1 and DNS2.  If DNS1 is
> > broken the resolver tries DNS2 - what is concurrency pattern called
> > (Pool of responders) or what?
> >
> > The other day I suggested that for fault tolerance it was much easier
> > to let the client go to multiple machines rather than use an expensive
> > load balancer and fail-over system on the server - but there was no
> > convenient name to capture this idea.
> >
> > There sees to be no accepted terminology here - so I'd appreciate any
> > suggestions you have as to the names of common currency patterns that
> > you use together with definitions of what the names mean.
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > /Joe
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > erlang-questions mailing list
> > erlang-questions@REDACTED
> > http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>
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