Columnist Mark Bereit is carrying on a discussion of the current computing paradigm failure (which he calls the paradigm trap) at http://www.markbereit.com/devel/paradigmtrap.html.
In an email exchange with me, Allan McInnes volunteered a really nice set of POP links, especially Fred Barnes' occam tutorial and the Erlang starting.html tutorial:
> Have you got any newbie introductory web references
> on Erlang?Well, probably the key Erlang-related URL to include is http://www.erlang.org/ - that's the main website for the open source release of Erlang. It includes a couple of quick tutorials (http://www.erlang.org/starting.html), as well as links to more comprehensive material (http://www.erlang.org/doc.html).
Beyond that, the other useful URL may be http://www.trapexit.org/ - TrapExit is the main community site for Erlang, and includes documentation and a handy wiki-based set of how-tos.
You might also consider including a link to the Wikipedia article on Erlang ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_programming_language), which provides a nice, quick overview of the language and some links to other information.
> I'd like to include them alongside the CSP/occam stuff,
> and I'm having some trouble finding even the latterThere isn't much occam stuff out there unfortunately. Some possibilities that immediately leap to mind are:
1. The Wikipedia article on occam ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam_programming_language)
2. Fred Barnes' occam tutorial (http://frmb.org/occtutor.html)
3. The old occam 2.1 manual ( http://www.wotug.org/occam/documentation/oc21refman.pdf)
4. Daniel Hyde's occam primer ( http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~cs366/occam.pdf)
For CSP you might try:
1. The Wikipedia CSP article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_processes)
2. The online version of Hoare's original text (http://usingcsp.com)
For a good description of the need, Eric Verhulst recommends “Escape the software development paradigm trap” by Mark Bereit. Eric adds,
I have still a lot of hardcopy on CSP and transputer/occam stuff but very little electronically. But have a look at http://www.wotug.org/reference.shtml
This is the “official” site, and is short on web-viewable articles, focusing instead on reference citations. For yet more advanced stuff, Allan recommends:
Here's another link that might be handy: http://occam-pi.org/ - the new home of KRoC and occam-pi. Includes links to a documentation wiki, as well as the occam and jcsp mailing list archives
Also, you may find it worthwhile to take a look at http://www.sics.se/~joe/thesis/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf - Joe Armstrong's PhD thesis, "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors". Joe is the guy behind Erlang, and his thesis describes the rationale for, and design of, Erlang. I'm still working through it myself, but have so far found that it provides some useful insights into why the developers of Erlang made the design choices they did (some of which are different than the ones made by INMOS in developing occam).