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Comment by limist | Hacker News Reader

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." - Alan Kay

This news is yet another data point that developers will need to hack concurrency sooner than later, as a core skill in one's professional repertoire. Off to learn Stackless PyPy, Clojure, Scala, etc...

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I think I can afford to wait until people start proving undeniably (through out-competing rivals) that Scala and Clojure have any pragmatic benefit in real multicore programming tasks. Anything that mentions Fibonacci numbers doesn't count, nor do easily parallelizable problems commonly handled in C/C++ (ray tracing, media encoding, web servers, etc.) It needs to be something not trivially broken up into independent parts.

While this isn't undeniable proof, it's interesting none the less, Simon Peyton Jones: Data Parallel Haskell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWSZ4c9yqW8

He talks about how this scheme can parallelize non-trivial data structures, and how tedious book keeping can be avoided. I haven't used it yet in a project, so I can't speak of its efficacy - but worth a watch, imho.

Don't forget that part of the claims are not that the resultant programs are more computing resource intensive but that they are more easily developed and debugged. Which is pretty important in this arena.

And while I don't know about Scala, Clojure is a little too young to obsess on preformance, each point release (1.0, 1.1, etc.) is delivering significant improvements.

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." - Alan Kay

Where are Sun, SGI, Cray, etc now?

Is Apple just an anomaly? Also, Sun was bought partially so that Oracle could offer a complete software/hardware package, so I'm not sure your point stands. The others had great runs with great hardware/software... they just didn't survive to the next generation.

And you can add Google and Microsoft to that list, too.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft don't build all their own hardware -- not in the same sense as Sun, SGI, and Cray. Apple uses Intel and ARM chips (even the A4 is a Cortex A8 with a PowerVR SGX). Apple is builds the best cases for their hardware, but the hardware is all pretty standard.

The Cray Jaguar is the fastest on the TOP500.

I'm actually in Chippewa Falls at the moment. :-)

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