[aeden]

"I love Erlang but I cannot get the past the syntax."

I also thought this. For some reason though the more I use it the more I am coming around to its syntax. There are lots of gotchas when compared with other popular languages, but still its syntax has grown on me recently.

At the opposite end of the syntactic spectrum is Lisp. The more I use Clojure the more I am loving it as well.

"The future of server programming does not have parallel access to shared memory."

I agree. The future of server programming is also not spawning multiple child processes. The question I have is how far off is that future? I know that most of my web applications today simply run in multiple spawned OS processes.

[aphyr]

I agree. The future of server programming is also not spawning multiple child processes. The question I have is how far off is that future? I know that most of my web applications today simply run in multiple spawned OS processes.

Barring a massive shift in hardware architectures, shared access by cooperating threads is your only option for high-performance shared state. Look at core counts vs core flops for the last five years. Look at Intel's push for NUMA architectures. This is a long-scale trend forced by fundamental physical constraints with present architectures, and I don't see it changing any time soon.

Anyone telling you shared state is irrelevant is just pushing the problem onto someone else: e.g., a database.

[canweriotnow]

"The future of server programming does not have parallel access to shared memory."

What about STM in Clojure? It's technically parallel access to shared memory, but the transactional nature obviates the need for mutexes and all the crap that makes shared memory a pain in the ass.