[idea]

Many languages focus more and more on multi-core and distributed programming. Mainstream language like Java and C# will get more tools and libraries, but other languages will likely be better. One thing i like about startups is that you can freely pick technologies that are better or faster in solving a problem. You don't have to cope with the conservatism problem.

Personally i think that languages like Scala, F# and Erlang will be good to learn, depending on what platform you prefer. And Clojure also seems very cool. I know it's blasphemy around here, but Clojure is the only Lisp like language that i would like to learn.

[pmjordan]

Disclosure: I'm a Clojure user.

Clojure is cool, and definitely worth a look if you fancy using STM. However, it's still early days, and although single-threaded performance is reasonably close to Java's (recently, very fast numeric vector operations were added) I haven't heard much about performance of concurrent applications. I suspect it might be a while before the STM implementation comes close to the optimal case, but I think it's pointing in the right direction, promoting pure functional programming and lazy evaluation with the built-in immutable data structures. Plus you get easy access to all Java libraries.

Finally, the Clojure implementation itself is pretty hackable and the mailing list is active and helpful. (I've made some minor contributions to the code myself)

I've done parallel programming in C, C++, and Fortran, using OpenMP, Pthreads/Win32 threads, and even using lock-free techniques, but it's always been an incredible hassle. It'll be interesting to see if Clojure manages to gain any significant traction. Long-term though it will need to gain some kind of support for massive parallelism. Something better than MPI.