George Wilson - An Intuition for Propagators - Compose Melbourne 2019

George Wilson introduces the propagator model of computation, explaining how stateful cells and stateless propagators structure concurrent computations.

An Intuition for Propagators The propagator model of computation developed by Radul and Sussman consists of stateful cells connected by independent stateless machines called propagators. These propagator networks are a helpful way to structure or think about computations, particularly those that are concurrent or distributed. This talk will give an intuition for what these propagator networks look like, why they work, and how we can use them to build programs. Efficient implementation will not be covered. The Haskell community has recently seen concurrency abstractions bearing similarities to propagators, such as the work on LVars by Kuper and Newton; and also projects directly influenced by propagators, such as Edward Kmett's recent work. About George Wilson George Wilson is an enthusiastic functional programmer from Brisbane, Australia. He works on open source Haskell projects and educational material at the Queensland Functional Programming Lab inside Data61. George is also a member of the Haskell Core Libraries Committee and the Haskell.org Committee.