[Haskell-cafe] Re: Why functional programming matters

ChrisK wrote:

Achim Schneider wrote:

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Don Stewart wrote:

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jwlato:

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In addition to STM, another item that should interest serious programmers is forkIO. Lightweight threads that (unlike in Python) can use multiple cpu's. Coming from Python, I personally appreciate this. Using STM to handle concurrency issues often greatly simplifies multithreaded code. And further on this, the use of `par` in pure code to make it go multicore is way beyond what most people think is possible.

I said _don't_ make me think of using par on a beowolf cluster of ps3's. Don't you guys have any scruples?

Well... ghc still has a single-threaded garbage collector, so all the "par" threads must stop for garbage collection. So scaling to the level of a cluster would be significantly sub-linear.

"By the time you learnt how to write proper Haskell, that's most likely implemented in an arcane one-liner using par." -- /me aleady drank a bootle of vin and suggests that you don't answer seriously if you want to get non-abstroose anwererse.