Award Date

May 2016

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Computer Science

Department

Computer Science

First Committee Member

Andreas Stefik

Second Committee Member

Ajoy Datta

Third Committee Member

Jan Pedersen

Fourth Committee Member

Matthew Bernacki

Number of Pages

79

Abstract

Various concurrent programming paradigms have been proposed by language designers in an effort to simplify some of the unique constructs required to handle concurrent programming tasks. Despite these different approaches, however, there has been no general clear winner accepted by software developers and different paradigms are regarded to have strengths and weaknesses in certain areas. This thesis was motivated by the desire to investigate the question of whether or not there are measurable differences between two widely differing paradigms for concurrent programming: Threads vs. Communicating Sequential Processes. The mechanism for observing and comparing these paradigms was a randomized controlled trial of two groups of participants who completed identical tasks in one of the two paradigms. The study was run in Fall 2015 with 88 student participants primarily from the Department of Computer Science at UNLV. I examined programming accuracy and comprehension rates among participants in three different common shared memory problem areas introduced by concurrent programming. The results were measured using a token accuracy map algorithm which matches the token strings of a participants answer compared to a correct solution. The overall results show that for two relatively straightforward tasks using shared processes and memory, both paradigms were reasonably well understood, with a possible small learning advantage in favor of CSP in two of the tasks. In a more complex example combining task co-ordination and memory sharing, however, the participants in the CSP group struggled to grasp the guarded blocking and communication channels needed in the CSP model and performed

measurably worse.

Keywords

Concurrency; Empirical; Languages; Parallel; Programming

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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