Haskell: A Good Bet for the Future

Everyone is pushing concurrency these days. Recently functional programming has re-emerged into the spotlight because the paradigm is particularly conducive to parallel programming. Three languages that have been getting a special amount of attention are Haskell, Erlang, and Clojure (and all three with good reason!).

Microsoft will be releasing a major concurrency framework called Parallel Extensions along with .NET 4.0, which will include parallel LINQ (PLINQ) and the parallel tasks (AKA futures) library. As usual, they’re well behind the curve, but at least when Microsoft gets into something, a lot of corporate programmers will start taking the technology seriously.

My problem recently has been picking one technology to focus on learning. Naturally, a large part of my time will go towards learning the new .NET 4.0 concurrency, but as a language for personal use, Haskell has won my attention. Instead of offering an amateur explanation of its advantages over other languages, I’m just going to link to some of the particularly interesting articles I’ve read on it recently:

Posted on September 11, 2009 from Calgary

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My name is Brandur. I'm a polyglot software engineer and part-time designer working at Heroku in San Francisco, California. I'm a Canadian expat. My name is Icelandic. Drop me a line at brandur@mutelight.org.

Aside from technology, I'm interested in energy and how it relates to our society, travel, longboarding, muay thai, symphonic metal, and the guitar.

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