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Time to Get Good At Functional Programming?
prone2tech writes "From an article at Dr. Dobb's: Chipmakers have essentially said that the job of enforcing Moore's Law is now a software problem. They will concentrate on putting more and more cores on a die, and it's up to the software industry to recraft software to take advantage of the parallel-processing capabilities of the new chips. As is argued in this article, this means becoming proficient in parallel functional programming. The bad news? Getting good at functional programming is hard, harder than moving from iterative Pascal or Basic or C coding to object-oriented development. It's an exaggeration but a useful one: When you move to FP, all your algorithms break.'"
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gains market share states tHat there
Pure functional programming removes all side effects.
Yes, at the expense of a copy-everything in sight, use zillions of message channels, kill your performance and spend billions of dollars to retrain millions of programmers to use a counterintuitive programming language. It ain't going to happen. Erlang and Lisp have been around for years. If FP was the answer, it would have happened already. The only reason it hasn't happened is because reality keeps kicking FP in the ass. As it should.
The bottom line is that FP is not the answer to the parallel programming crisis. FP is not just counterintuitive and hard to learn but it is also non-deterministic, meaning that it is not well-suited to mission critical systems. FP is a continuation of the same process/thread mentality that has gotten the industry into this mess in the first place.
I am really coming to the point where I seriously doubt that the academic community (and behemoths like Intel and Microsoft) can provide the type of leadership that is needed to get the industry around this difficult period in computer history. This is depressing. It is time for the baby boomer generation, who gave got us all enfatuated with Turing Machines and threads (both useless for true parallel programming), to step aside and let a new generation have a turn at the helm. You guys got us into this mess, no use in denying it. Now you have run out of ideas simply because you are too old and set in your ways.
If you're truly interested in solving this problem, as opposed to holding on to your job until you retire, read How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis for more info.