[patrikmcguire]

Has anyone had any real-world experience using X!0? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_(programming_language)

It came out of IBM (Eclipse license) at about the same time as Watson, and I've gotten the impression that it (compiled down to C++) was the main language used for it.

One of the authors was a guest professor whenever I took my parallel programming course and wound up teaching about half the classes, so its abilities and use may have been exaggerated slightly, but it has a lot of constructs built in that I'd imagine to be terrible to implement otherwise - good globally synchronized clocks and memory management across everything on the current "place" (roughly one physical computer), although you could still had to manage memory you sent to different places manually.

But Wikipedia says Watson's built mostly on Hadoop, where the coolest features wouldn't really have much of an effect, so it may be just a crazy research language. I was just curious.

[scott_s]

Watson is not "built on" Hadoop. From http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/23...:

To preprocess the corpus and create fast run-time indices we used Hadoop. UIMA annotators were easily deployed as mappers in the Hadoop map-reduce framework. Hadoop distributes the content over the cluster to afford high CPU utilization and provides convenient tools for deploying, managing, and monitoring the corpus analysis process.

The online parts of Watson use UIMA: http://uima.apache.org/

[qznc]

X10 is a research language: Interesting concepts, crappy implementation.

X10 is also dying as IBM is shutting down its research groups. Unless some other institution (some university chair?) will step up for maintenance, its development will halt soon.

[scott_s]

IBM is shutting down its research groups

That is not a true statement.