> The next big platform is multiple cores/multiple CPUs. The next big language is functional and helps deal with consistency across time and across CPUs.
So the popular opinion in the Internet echo chamber keeps telling me, but somehow I don't buy it.
If you do, please try to answer this simple question: what single application of widespread importance benefits on a game-changing scale from running on multiple cores?
It's not office productivity/business automation applications like word processors, spreadsheets, and accounting packages. They could run just fine on a typical desktop PC years ago. Sure, it's useful to run multiple applications simultaneously, but the OS can handle the scaling in that case.
It's not mass information distribution/web applications. The bottlenecks there are typically caused by limited communications bandwidth or database issues. While concurrency is obviously a big factor internally in databases, most of us don't actually write database engines.
It's not games. Most AAA titles today still don't scale up in that way, and one mid-range graphics card with its specialist processor would blow away a top-end quad-Xeon workstation when it comes to real-time rendering. Again, there is some degree of concurrency here, but many intensive graphics rendering problems are embarrassingly parallel in several ways, so again this isn't much of a challenge even for today's mainstream programming languages and design techniques.
I suspect the most likely mainstream beneficiaries of better multi-core/multi-CPU support would be things where there really is heavy calculation going on behind the scenes and it's not always uniform: multimedia processing, CAD, etc.
However, what about the alternative directions the industry might take? The Internet age has emphasized some basic realities of software development that as an industry we weren't good at recognising before.
For one thing, many useful tools are not million-lines-of-code monsters but relatively simple programs with far fewer lines of code. It's knowing what those lines should do that counts. That means rapid development matters, and that in turn requires flexible designs and easy prototyping.
For another thing, data matters far more than any particular piece of software. Protecting that data matters much more in a connected world with fast and widespread communications, so security is more important than ever, and we need software that doesn't crash, suffer data loss bugs, and so on.
So I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that multi-core/multi-CPU is not in fact going to be the dominant factor in the success of near-future languages. I think flexibility and robustness are going to be far more important.
It may turn out that the attributes of a more declarative programming style support these other factors as well. It may be that functional programming becomes the default for many projects as a consequence. But I don't think any future rise of functional programming will be driven by a compelling advantage to do with implementing modest concurrency on multi-core systems. That just isn't where the real bottlenecks are (in most cases).