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> I think there's a large opportunity cost to dismissing concurrency & parallelism at this moment. I'm not dismissing the idea, nor claiming that it is not val
by Chris_Newton 16y ago
> I think there's a large opportunity cost to dismissing concurrency & parallelism at this moment.
I'm not dismissing the idea, nor claiming that it is not valuable for any application. Clearly that parallelism would have value to a significant number of projects, which perhaps don't make best use of the host hardware today. I'm just trying to keep the multi-core idea in perspective, relative to other ways our programming languages might improve.
Better multi-core support can get you a constant factor speed-up in computationally expensive work, but Amdahl's Law tends to spoil even that. On the other hand, a language with a type system that allows you to prevent entire classes of programmer error could lead to a step change in security or robustness. A language expressive enough to capture the developer's intent in ways that today's programming models do not could lead to entirely new techniques for keeping designs flexible, supporting new rapid development processes, or it could create opportunities for optimisers that bring the performance of more expressive languages to a level where they compete with lower-level languages used in the same field today for speed reasons. I suspect that across the field of programming as a whole, such improvements would be far more widely applicable.