Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!

Chapter 10. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Concurrency

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable beginning of the 21st century lies a small subset of human knowledge. Within this subset of human knowledge is an utterly insignificant little discipline whose Von Neumann−descended architecture is so amazingly primitive that it is still thought that RPN calculators are a pretty neat idea.

This discipline has—or rather had—a problem, which was this: Most of the people studying it were unhappy for pretty much of the time when trying to write parallel software. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the handling of little pieces of logic called locks and mutexes and whatnot, which is odd ...