«
»

Functional Language Explosion

There is suddenly a lot of interest in functional languages recently.  The two advantages are

  • Writing a DSL (Domain Specific Language)
  • Writing concurrent code

The languages that seem to come up are:

  • Clojure (JVM)
  • F# (based on OCaml, Haskell, and ML) (.Net CLR)
  • Erlang (JVM)

I'm not particularly interested in DSL (despite my last post on code generators), however as CPUs contain more and more cores, we'll need a way to safely write multithreaded code.

The Clojure project has an interesting post on its approach on simplifying multithreaded code.

Erlang handles concurrency by only having local variables and providing a way to send messages to and from other threads.

Lastly, MPI is a .Net library for distributed processing where the same program executes multiple times and each instance communicates with each other using message passing which sounds very Erlang-like.

Tags: , ,

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 at 10:50 am and is filed under Languages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Functional Language Explosion”

  1. cheng wei says:
    October 20, 2008 at 8:21 am

    Hi, I am afraid Erlang is not based on JVM. It uses BEAM or HiPE.

  2. cheng wei says:
    October 20, 2008 at 8:23 am

    Moreover, if you are interested in finding more advantages of functional programming, maybe you can search “why functional programming matters” and “functional programming for the rest of us”.

  3. Clay Lenhart says:
    October 21, 2008 at 10:51 am

    Thanks for the pointers to the papers. I plan on reading this when I have some time.

    Right you are about Erlang. I mixed some of the languages.

Leave a Reply