Concurrent Programming: Ozma and Reducer Library

Topics

• Reducer Library (Nicolas Bousquet)

• Ozma (Sébastien Doeraene)

Salle: INRIA Euler Violet

Inria will host our meetup this time and registration is mandatory to be able to attend the meeting. We understand that some people don't want to use Meetup, in this case just email me at anrizal05 at gmail or tweet @riviera_func to notify your participation.

Start: 18.30.

Agenda

18.30 - 18.40 Opening

18.40 - 18.50 Introduction of the session

18.50 - 19.20 Reducer Library

19.20 - 19.30 Pause

19.30 - 20.30 Ozma

Description (Meetup #9)

One of the reason often used by functional programming fans on the use of functional paradigm is concurrent programming in multicore computer. The limit of the computer speed is reached, and now crisis, bla bla bla.

Whether or not you believe with those arguments, concurrent program is indeed easier to develop and reason using functional programming. Clojure has Atom, Ref, Agent ... Scala has its traditional Actor in Akka.

Rich Hickey has just introduced a mind-blowing Reducer Library that is a powerful concurrency abstraction. Nicolas Bousquet will give a short introduction on the library. Despite its name, it has not many things to do with Map-Reduce :-)

But, there is a very powerful concurrency abstraction called data flow or deterministic concurrency, introduced in Oz / Mozart (http://www.mozart-oz.org/) language developed in Université Catholique de Louvain. The concept benefits a lot from immutability, laziness, and functional programming. If you are serious into concurrency, you have to check out Mozart and its canonical book Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computing Programming. (http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Techniques-Models-Computer-Programming/dp/0262220695/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349074746&sr=8-1&keywords=Concepts%2C+Techniques%2C+and+Models+of+Computer+Programming) For me, the book is THE bible of modern concurrent programming.

And guess what, your beloved group managed to convince the lead developer of Mozart-Oz directly from Louvain, Belgium, Sébastien Doeraene to come and see us. He will discuss with us Ozma, a Scala implementation that targets Oz Virtual Machine.

More on Ozma: https://github.com/sjrd/ozma

(Anwar Rizal)

Thanks to INRIA Sophia Antipolis who host us and Gabriel Cardoso who arranged this new venue.