Larry O'Brien asks "
Are CLR and JVM suited to manycore?" My first instinct is to say no, because they're built on
sequential execution and mutable data structures. That said, RPN-stack-based code like IL and
JVM opcodes (modulo control flow instructions) is basically an expression graph serialization
format, so there's a shadow of hope in there, also considering
Expression<T>
and friends in LINQ. However, I definitely don't think either of them are in the shape of the
end of the road, a suitable
UNCOL.
I'm sure you're familiar with
Wesner Moise's blog, where
he's made some entries relating to the idea of moving away from structures requiring mutability,
and towards more functional structures. One recent post that's still in my RSS reader is
http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2006/09/modelview.html, where he hints at some
interesting ways of using immutable structures in document / view architectures.
For better or worse, I don't fully share Larry's pessimism (privately related) about functional
/ dataflow and other "different" ideas. I think we'll see more stratification in the software
industry, as people who need the extra performance of parallelism seek out new local development
optima, while people who only need current-day levels of performance for tasks that are relatively
trivially parallelized (such as today's request/response server code) use other, more procedural
languages, like Ruby, C#, Delphi, etc.
IMO, one of the worst things historically to have ever happened in programming was the fashion
for C as the "real" programming language. With its primitive strings and its unsafe standard
library (i.e. including functions which are literally unsafe no matter which way you call them,
consider
gets() for example), I think it's wrought unnecessary and disproportionate
harm. I hope that any coming stratification doesn't fall into similar social trip-ups that blight
us for another few decades.
