On Dec 31, 2006, at 4:54 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> Francis Cianfrocca wrote:
>> 'Multicore architectures: many people will probably disagree  
>> vehemently with
>> this, but I think that taking advantage of the new architectures  
>> will best
>> be achieved by breaking computations up into multiple processes. I  
>> think the
>> style that is broadly represented by Erlang will be the most  
>> effective
>> approach, so a new "paradigm shift" (sorry) in programming is coming.
>> (That's why I've worked so hard on event-driven programming  
>> support for
>> Ruby.) But teaching programmers to be better at multithreading,  
>> etc. will be
>> fruitless because this approach is really difficult now, and will  
>> be far
>> more difficult on highly parallel or multicore hardware. That's my  
>> two cents
>> on the subject, and it's worth every penny ;-).
> On the contrary -- I'll agree vehemently on some of this and  
> disagree less strenuously on the rest.
>
> Vehement agreement: Erlang-style lightweight processes are a  
> *proven* way to solve large complex problems on large collections  
> of hardware. However, Erlang does some other things that seem to  
> stick in the craw of a lot of folks here -- like a functional  
> programming style and compile-time type checking. :)
>
> Disagreement, but perhaps more a lack of acceptance of reality: I  
> think today's programmers are up to the task of highly parallel  
> programming, because there are many decades of theory and practical  
> experience in it already. I posted a rant about this already today,  
> so I'm not going to belabor the point. I'll just fall back on  
> Arthur C. Clarke's Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist  
> says something is possible, he is usually proven right. :)

At this year's C4 conference [1], Steve Dekorte gave a presentation  
[2] on programming using the Actor Model [3]. It was fascinating to  
me since I had never been exposed to anything like it before. His IO  
language [4] is rather pretty too.

It would be wonderful to wrap something like this up in ruby so it  
was a first-class citizen in the language.

cr

[1] http://c4.rentzsch.com/0/ AND http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_% 
28conference%29
[2] http://www.iolanguage.com/docs/talks/2006-10-C4/Actors.pdf
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model
[4] http://iolanguage.com/about/