Okay, so over on O’Reilly’s flamewar over writing “thread-safe” Ruby, the piece responding to DHH’s re-iteration of what he said at my MinneBar presentation, someone chimed in with this gem:

The fundamental problem is functional vs. imperative programming languages.

Imperative programming languages make it easy to write sequential programs and hard to write parallel programs.

Purely functional programming languages make it hard to write sequential programs (monads), but easy to write parallel programs.

Ruby has some functional programming features, but it still relies heavily on state which makes automatic parallelization difficult.

Multicore processors will drive the adoption of functional programming languages like Erlang and Haskell. (cite)

That’s almost exactly what I said at MinneBar. It’s really nice to see someone else reading the writing on the wall.

On the other hand, I’m with DHH in the general argument. For general app development, functional languages are inevitable. However, for Rails’ purpose, networks are always going to be the bottleneck, and so any concurrency system more complicated than Unix’s processes is unnecessary.

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