The Next Big Thing

[#1]

I recently purchased a machine that has a couple of quad-core processors. Since I have 8 cores I thought "Maybe I should learn how to write some code that will use it effectively." This is essentially realizing the free lunch for software development is over, at least with the current 3GLs. I've mentioned the multi-core and parallel computing trend in the blog before.

The language I use most for my recreational (software) programming fix is C#. I looked around for some concurrent programming books that covered the topic in sufficient depth, and stumbled across Concurrent Programming on Windows by Joe Duffy.

Yes, this might not be as trendy as F# or too tied to Microsoft, but I only have so much time to learn new stuff. This book does weigh in at just under 1,000 pages, so and it's a pretty dense topic, so we'll see how far I get before getting absorbed into something else. Fortunately, there is an on-line version, so I will not have to carry it on a plane with me.

So far one of my biggest problems is that I can't spell parallel consistently, so we'll see how many blogs getting written about it!!

[#2]

I think the multicore pc has really opened peoples eyes to multi-cpu programming. It's been around for years in the server area but now people can have a multi CPU box of their very own and discover how badly things can go wrong when things are really done in parallel :-)

(Re parallel - the spell checker on Firefox is a wonderful thing)

[#3]

Even though it has been around in the server area for a while, research in this space seemed to have languished for a while. Whole new approaches are going to be required if we're going to keep the creation of new implementations going at the previous pace. On the other hand, not everything needs to be optimized to be parallel. So not all programmers need to be geek gods.