Concurrency video
Our Concurrency Made Easy project, the result of an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant, is trying to solve the problem of making concurrent programming simple, reliable and effective. It has spurred related efforts, in particular the Roboscoop project applying concurrency to robotics software.
Sebastian Nanz and other members of the CME project at ETH have just produced a video that describes the aims of the project and presents some of the current achievements. The video is available on the CME project page [1] (also directly on YouTube [2]).
References
[1] Concurrency Made Easy project, here.
[2] YouTube CME video, here.
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I have what I imagine is a rather elementary question for you about SCOOP.
The part I never understood about using preconditions for synchronization was this. Suppose I have a program of the form “if account.balance > amount then account.transfer(amount, other account) else report_insufficient_funds”. If I attempt two transfers, with sufficient funds for each but not for both, this program works as expected if executed sequentially, but with SCOOP it can hang forever, waiting for the account balance to reach the appropriate level, which may never happen.
I don’t understand how that is an acceptable behaviour, or how it obeys the “principle of least surprise” for the programmer who wrote the sequential version. Wouldn’t the least surprising behaviour be for one of the transfers to succeed and one to fail?