With the arrival of more and more cores on the typical processor chip these days, concurrency is becoming an screamingly important topic in programming. Unfortunately, many people seem to think that the solution to concurrent programming is a Functional Programming language. For example, in the January issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal there is an article on "It's Time to Get Good at Functional Programming" which has received a lot of comment around the web.
I have been doing concurrent programming for a long time, but I have never understood why there there is any connection between functional programming and concurrency. Rather than waste a lot of time with specious argument, let me just give a counterexample. Occam was the first programming language designed specifically for programming concurrent computer systems. It is based on the Concurrent Sequential Processes (CSP) notation of Tony Hoare. While Occam has functions, it is by no means a language for functional programming, having eschewed recursion in the first few versions of the language.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment