[gavinpc]

I just wanted to thank you (belatedly) for a thoughtful reply. The truth is, I don't know anything about hardware and have just been on an Alan Kay binge. But Alan Kay is a researcher and doesn't seem to care as much about commodity hardware, which I do. So I don't mean to propose that an entire high-level language (even Lisp) be baked into the hardware. But I do think that we could use some higher-level primitives -- the kind that tend to get implemented by nearly all languages. Or even something like "worlds" [0], which as David Nolen notes [1, 2] is closely related to persistent data structures.

Basically (again, knowing nothing about this), I assume that there's a better balance to be struck between the things that hardware vendors have already mastered (viz, pipelines and caches) and the things that compilers and runtimes work strenuously to simulate on those platforms (garbage collection, abstractions of any kind, etc).

My naive take is that this whole "pivot" from clock speed to more cores is just a way of buying time. This quad-core laptop rarely uses more than one core. It's very noticeable when a program is actually parallelized (because I track the CPU usage obsessively). So there's obviously a huge gap between the concurrency primitives afforded by the hardware and those used by the software. Still, I think that they will meet in the middle, and it'll be something less "incremental" than multicore, which is just more-of-the-same.

[0] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2008001_worlds.pdf

[1] https://www.recurse.com/blog/55-paper-of-the-week-worlds-con...

[2] https://twitter.com/swannodette/status/421347385915498496