Lambda the Ultimate

While teaching INGI1131, my concurrent programming course, I have become even more impressed by a concurrent paradigm, namely functional programming extended with threads and ports, which I call multi-agent dataflow programming. This paradigm has many good properties:

• The declarative concurrent subset (no ports) has no race conditions and can be programmed like a functional language. The basic concept is dataflow synchronization of single-assignment variables. A useful data structure is the stream, a list with dataflow tail used as a communication channel.
  
• Nondeterminism can be added exactly where needed and minimally, by using ports. A port is simply a named stream to which any thread can send.
  
• All functional building blocks are concurrency patterns. Map, fold, filter, etc., are all useful for building concurrent programs. Here are two examples: a contract net protocol and an observable port object. Chapter 5 of CTM gives many more examples.
  
• Concurrent systems can be configured in any order and even concurrently with actual use of the system. Note that this is true for ports even though they can express nondeterminism.
  
• Designing concurrent programs is amazingly easy. For example, any declarative part of the program can be put in its own thread, loosening the coupling between system's parts, without changing correctness.
  
• The paradigm is easy to implement efficiently.
  
• The paradigm is easily extended to support fault-tolerant transparent distributed programming: see Raphael Collet's dissertation. Google's MapReduce is a famous example.
  

This paradigm seems to be exactly what is needed for both small and big parallel systems (both multicore and Internet, tight and loose coupling). I am surprised that it is not used more often. What do you think? Does it deserve a bigger role?