[cageface]

Sure but this is also what you generally do in an imperative threaded app. Break the work up into discrete jobs and use a producer/consumer model to parallelize it. This has to be done carefully and usually requires an intimate understanding of the flow of the computation. It might be easier to do this in a functional language but their advantages tend to be mostly at the micro level and the hard stuff tends to be at the macro level.

I honestly think that the advantages of FP for concurrency will turn out to be relatively minor and that FP is more interesting as a means of improving code reuse and reducing bug counts. I'm not convinced that the current crop of FP languages are a win in those respects either though, taken as a whole.

[lukev]

Well, yeah. There's no silver bullet. But it's much easier to start lopping off branches from the tree if there are no unmanaged side effects.

Programming languages of the future need to enforce thread safety and mutation semantics as well as they do type safety. Functional programming is a step in that direction.

Nobody's necessarily claiming that a concurrent Clojure/Erlang/Haskell app is faster than concurrent C++/Java one, but they're definitely safer and easier to write.

[cageface]

I wonder if the kind of concurrency people have been focused on in these kinds of conversations is really going to turn out to be that important. It seems to me like a lot of the really cpu-intensive problems people are trying to solve are way beyond the scale of a single machine - the kinds of problems you need a big hadoop-style farm to tackle. How many apps are there left that really need maximum throughput in a shared memory architecture?