Burton Smith vs Erik Meijer
We were recently led to a fascinating Channel 9 interview where the insideous Erik Meijer walks in on parallelism-expert Burton Smith , culminating in a fight the likes of which have not been seen since Chris Curry vs Sir Clive Sinclair in the Baron of Beef here in Cambridge. A pragmatic Burton points out that lazy evaluation renders performance unpredictable and that, in turn, makes it impossible to tune the granularity of parallel programs to ensure that more effort is spent doing actual work than is wasted administering parallel tasks. The puritanical Erik points out that strictness is essentially another form of side effect because it affects issues such as non-termination. The conclusion is irreconcilable differences between what parallel programming requires and what purely functional programming can provide. Erik and Burton were joined by an elephant in the room though: caches. They are the main difference between supercomputers and multicores and are a game changer, yet peopl...