I remember a talk by Alan Kay where he mentioned a number of problems commonly solved serially, such as 2D layout and typesetting, and then he demonstrated a pa

I remember a talk by Alan Kay where he mentioned a number of problems commonly solved serially, such as 2D layout and typesetting, and then he demonstrated a parallel algorithm for each problem. If I remember and understand correctly (I may not), one of his points was that such algorithms can become trivially implementable in a dynamic language and would run fast too, if the hardware supported some of the primitives of that dynamic language natively. He expressed hope that FPGAs may create such an opportunity.