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.