Re: Paul Graham's PyCon Keynote

[Eli Collins <address@hidden>]

from http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

> The real question is, how far up the ladder of abstraction will
> parallelism go? In a hundred years will it affect even application
> programmers?

Has anyone thought about the ramifications of FPGA computers on PLs? I
know many researchers have looked into imperative and functional parallel
programming, but what if FPGA computers become mainstream? Languages could
program basic data structures and routines into the computer dynamically.
If Moore's law does not hold maybe there will be a lot more "extra
headroom" available on parallel machines. This headroom could give
parallel languages the evolutionary nudge.

> This implies that the kind of parallelism we have in a hundred years
> will not, except in special applications, be massive parallelism

Joe Armstrong argued at LL2 that concurrent programs are easier to write
and understand than sequential programs. Could an Erlang descendant
running on commodity PCs with thousands of FPGAs finally liberate us from
the von Neuman Style? I'm not so sure parallelism can't climb to the top
of the ladder of abstraction.

Eli