[elorant]

To be honest I never expected that we’d live to see a quantum computer in this decade. Despite of what D-Wave’s machine actually is the fact remains that we’re pretty close to achieving this milestone. How would this change the computer industry though is something I can’t even start to fathom.

What really interests me though as a programmer is whether we’d have to change our tools too when quantum computers become the norm. Would we have to adopt new programming techniques or we’d make it by refining the ones we already use? How would techniques like multithread programming evolve in a machine like this?

[smithzvk]

I don't actually think this will change things as much as you might think. New problems would be efficiently computable, sure, new programming paradigms will be needed, yes, but people have been producing abstractions for a very long time. If you want to know what it will be like to program a QC, look at what it is like to program in CUDA, OpenCL, Prolog, SQL, or any high level language with a compiler. All of these things do substantial work that the vast majority of users are not aware of. 99.9% of programmers will go out and buy a book called "OpenQC for Dummies" and they will build up a set of heuristics for proper programming techniques. Meanwhile, 0.01% of programmers will actually understand QC, and make this abstractions simpler for the rest of the world.

[gizmo686]

If this interest you, check out QCL [1], it is a quantum computer programming language and emulator.

I suspect that quantum computers will, at best, be simmilar to how we view GPU's now, good for specialized programming tasks.

[1] http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~oemer/qcl.html