Lambda the Ultimate

From the programming-languages-for-bosses department, an article in the June 4 Technology Quarterly of The Economist, Parallel bars:

Surely this problem [(finding ways to make it easy to write software that can take full advantage of the power of parallel processing)] will be solved by some bright young entrepreneur who will devise a new parallel-programming language and make a fortune in the process? Alas, designing languages does not seem to provide a path to fame and riches.

Too bad! The article goes on to describe the problem in more detail, and briefly mentions Chapel and X10 before finishing with:

Meanwhile, a group of obscure programming languages used in academia seems to be making slow but steady progress, crunching large amounts of data in industrial applications and behind the scenes at large websites. Two examples are Erlang and Haskell, both of which are “functional programming” languages.

Such languages are based on a highly mathematical programming style (based on the evaluation of functions) that is very different from traditional, “imperative” languages (based on a series of commands). This puts many programmers off. But functional languages turn out to be very well suited to parallel programming. Erlang was originally developed by Ericsson for use in telecoms equipment, and the language has since been adopted elsewhere: it powers Facebook’s chat feature, for example. Another novel language is Scala, which aims to combine the best of both functional and traditional languages. It is used to run the Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare websites, among others.