[Haskell] Haskell as a disruptive technology?

[Tim Docker]

Robert Dockins wrote:

> All we have to do is be ready for it when it arrives.   
> When people see that, using Haskell, they can write programs using 1)

> fewer man-hours with 2) fewer bugs which 3) scale effortlessly to  
> highly parallel hardware to beat the pants off C/C++/Java/what-have- 
> you, they'll be beating down the doors to get it.

> I'd love to see Haskell on highly concurrent hardware becoming more  
> of a reality: Haskell on the Cell is a great idea; I'd love to see  
> Haskell over MPI (using YHC bytecode maybe?); Haskell-over-GPU (you  
> know you like it!); and of course, SMP Haskell is also interesting.   
> One of the things I love about Haskell is that the language  
> definition transcends execution strategy/environment.

I think your enthusiasm outstrips reality a bit here. STM appear
to provide a much improved model for concurrent programming on shared
memory architectures (I say "appears" here because I've read the papers
but haven't used it).

Whilst this applies directly to the limited scalability of new
multi-core
desktop machines, I don't think it's going to provide huge benefits to
the
more scalable architectures based upon message passing (eg MPI and
Cell).
I'd be pleased to be corrected, but I'm not aware of any mainstream
haskell
libs/extensions that make implementing message passing concurrent
systems fundamentally easier than in other languages.

Tim