On 27/10/16 6:17 PM, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
Am 27.10.2016 um 01:05 schrieb Richard A. O'Keefe:
This means that in the foreseeable future we are going to need to learn a new style of programming because the antique style, as exemplified by say Java, just isn't going to scale.
I think you underestimate the adaptability of existing languages.
Well, I don't think so.
Java has been preparing to move towards immutability&FP. At glacier-like speed, admittedly, but once those massively multicore systems appear, Java will be prepared to move.
Nobody ever said Java (or any other language) can't ADD things. The problem is that Java can't REMOVE the things that get in the way without ceasing to be Java. It's just like the way you can ADD things (complex arithmetic in C99, threads in C11) to C, but you can't REMOVE the things that make C horribly dangerous without it ceasing to be C (and thereby ceasing to be useful in its admitted niche). The fundamental operation in Java is the assignment statement. It is fundamental to the Java Memory Model that when optimising memory references the compiler is explicitly allowed to pretend that threading doesn't exist. If you fix those issues, you don't have Java any more.
Haskell can claim to be already there, but wrt. how many issues have been staying unaddressed, it's no better than Java, it's just different issues. IOW this is not a predetermined race.
Nobody ever said it was. To be honest, I don't think ANY existing language will survive unscathed. I really wasn't talking about a race, simply making the point that we need new ideas, not just a rehash of the old ones. A very simple point: the more cores are running at once, the sooner your program will run into trouble, if it runs into trouble at all. And the more cores are running at once, the nastier it gets for a human being trying to debug the code. So we're looking for a language that can give us strong guarantees that certain kinds of mistakes either CAN'T happen because the language cannot express them or WON'T happen because it can verify that your particular program doesn't do those bad things.