Concurrent Tautologys (all happening together at once)

I step away from the inkernet for five minutes and of course I miss six million little things.

Multi-core programming... concurrent programming... It's coming at us from three different directions now:

1. Your next computer will have 32 or so processors
2. Your server-side code may get to execute across hundreds or thousands of machines
3. Your ajaxian scripts could share their processing load over hundreds of zombie client machines

(Yeh, okay, one of those is pure sci-fi)

On J.Spolsky's advice I read a lot of steve yegge stuff recently (particularly here and here), wherein he discusses the sort of problems you have at a server-side monster like Amazon. He keeps coming back to functional programming. (Lisp in particular, for him.)

The new client-side multi-core scenario is also tilted toward functional programming.

To that end, and of course by popular demand, the next 3 minute tutorial will be on F#. It's taken me a lot longer than three minutes to write of course, and it isn't ready yet. But it will be soon enough.

Meanwhile, here's a quote that keeps running around in my head.... Wirth's Law:

"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster."

_{solve: one squared plus two squared plus three squared plus four squared equals three cubed plus three.}

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