The Fundamental Paradigms of Programming are Going to be Challenged

Tim O’Reilley in Concurrent Programming: Erlang, Haskell… and XSLT

the fundamental paradigms of programming are going to be challenged as systems and processors scale up.

Erlang and Haskell have been mentioned as some possible candidates.

Erlang is designed from the ground up to help programmers create highly concurrently (read thousands or processes), highly reliable (read 99.99999% uptime) applications. It’s a real world language–it is used to write telephone switches, banking applications, trading systems…you name it.

With multi-cores multiplying and the complexity of application development increasing, we may need a new approach and a new language. Or possibly an old one like Erlang that can scale well.

Some times I wonder whether all this complexity can be taken care of by the operation system. Microsoft certainly thinks so.

The speed of the machines, as I said, is going to depend on this parallel programming. And so the operating system, as it has over the years, will take on higher level tasks. And so that as applications are calling the operating system, the sophistication of doing this parallel programming will be handled in the operating system itself.