Clementson on Concurrency

That would be Bill Clementson, in Concurrent/Parallel Programming - The Next Generation. I’ve been working on so much other stuff that the concurrency’s kind of been crowded out. Which isn’t good, because the highly-parallel future hasn’t stopped getting closer, and I just haven’t heard that much exciting concurrency news recently. Except from Google, where MapReduce and Sawzall may be pointing one of the ways forward. I actually did a little fooling around with Erlang (damn, that is one heavyweight install) and there’s a lot to like, but I don’t think the world is ready to give up object-orientation. There’s low-hanging fruit out there, and lots of pieces of the solution are in plain view, and we know where we’re trying to go: to a place where ordinary application programmers’ code naturally and effortlessly takes advantage of multi-core, multi-processor, clustered, or otherwise parallel hardware deployments. Because scaling out, rather than scaling up, is still the future.