[Haskell] Haskell as a disruptive technology?

[Sebastian Sylvan]

On 3/27/06, Paul Johnson <paul at cogito.org.uk> wrote:

>
> Is there a market that is poorly served by the incumbent languages for
> which Haskell would be an absolute godsend?
>

As far as I'm concerned, yes almost every market. At least soon.
Within a few years (say, five) we will have tens of cores on the
desktop. The speed of an application will correspond fairly directly
to how well it uses multiple threads. This will only become more and
more true in the future.
Haskell (lightweight threads + STM) really is a godsend in this area.
It's really not feasible to distribute a general application to tens
or hundreds of threads in C++ (or any imperative langauge, really).
Some specific problems (e.g. raytracing) are simple enough to be
easily parallellised in any language, but in general we need purely
functional programming with good support for concurrency and
parallellism if we are to have any hope of remaining sane while using
these massively multicore systems of the future effectively.
Haskell (or rather GHC) is ideal here. Parallellising pure functions
are fairly easy, for concurrency I think message passing and immutable
values are really pretty the best story right now, and even if you
decide you need some layer of shared-state concurrency we can remain
pretty safe using STM.

/S

--
Sebastian Sylvan
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