Lambda the Ultimate

in an attempt to make up for the bad "subjective aside" that happened in a parallel universe and which will now go unmentioned, i'm interested in learning more about deterministic concurrency after reading Peter Van Roy's educational chapter. speaking for my self, i enjoy having constraints which can help me avoid bad code; the linked paper uses model checking as well as deterministic concurrency.

We believe the way forward is to provide more constrained par-
allel programming models that avoid some of these challenges by
construction. While restrictions mean that certain kinds of algo-
rithms are ruled out (or at least very awkward to code), this seems
a reasonable price to pay for correct programs.

the subjective thing is that i feel like most industrial developers are not willing to take on some constraints in order to be more safe. i find that frustrating, and wonder if/when/what could contribute to changing the mind set from "i'll do anything i darned well please, thank you very much" to more one of "hey, i'm going to be a responsible driver"?

also, since the paper targets the Cell processor, i wonder if the fact that people complain about how hard the PS3 is to develop for could lead some industry folks to become more interested in systems like that of the paper; systems which (to my mind) have chocolate+peanutbutter: a development system that makes using big parallelism safer and easier.

lastly, the results aren't the be-all, end-all. even though the system is helping us be safer and in some tests do better, there is still plenty of work to figure out how to really take advantage of all the possible power. which gets into the good/bad points of relying on a sufficiently smart compiler, another subjective area. i hope that things like GC, as imperfect as it is in many situations, help us work our way towards 'sufficiently smart' systems that really do work well overall.