Writing concurrent programs in Java is hard and writing correct concurrent programs is even harder. What should be noted is that the main problem is not concurrency itself but the use of mutable shared state. Reasoning about concurrent updates to, and guarding of, mutable shared state is extremely difficult. It imposes problems like dealing with race conditions, deadlocks, live locks, thread starvation etc.
It might come as a surprise to some people but there are alternatives to the so-called "Shared-State Concurrency" (that has been adopted by C, C++, Java and has become the default industry standard way of dealing with concurrency problems). In this talk Jonas Bonér will discuss the importance of immutability and explore alternative paradigms such as Dataflow Concurrency, Message-Passing Concurrency and Software Transactional Memory (STM).
