Teaching Software Transactional Memory in Concurrency Courses with Clojure and Java.

In the field of concurrency and parallelism, it is known that the use of lock-based synchronization mechanisms limits the programming efficiency of concurrent applications and reveals problems in thread synchronization. Software Transactional Memory (STM) is a consolidated concurrency control mechanism that may be considered as an alternative to lock-based constructs for programming critical software, although STM is still not fully accepted as a programming model for the industry. It is our opinion that STM programming must be more emphasized in undergraduate courses on concurrency and parallelism. In this paper we propose an academic experience regarding the introduction of STM programming in concurrency courses by using the Clojure language as the common vehicle for teaching Concurrent Programming. Java, the most popular and extended programming language for teaching concurrency, becomes a second language in our course, and thus our students can take advantage of Clojure API which is defined in Java in order to simplify the development of programming, lectures and assignments.