May 30, 2005

Preparations for the Future - Parallel and Functional Programming Paradigms

MIT OpenCourseWare | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | 6.827 Multithreaded Parallelism: Languages and Compilers, Fall 2002 | Lecture Notes

A colleague of mine recently pointed me to this MITOpenCourseware [see above link] as something worthwhile to add to my studies. This particular individual is a highly regarded scientist in his field of study, much of which is squarely focused on Functional programming.

Enter the world of Parallel programming. We've all heard of it. Some of us may have even studied it a bit and even written a program or two utilizing the some of the patterns specific to the Parallel programming genre. This is FANTASTIC and is something that can not be underestimated for its value.

Multicore processors are the hot new ticket in the hardware world. It is with these processors that we will be able to take full advantage of the parallel programming techniques suggested in this online-courseware from arguably (I wouldn't argue this, but some might) the most prestigous school of technology in the entire world. At the heart of this courseware is Functional programming, which in many ways can be considered synonimous with Parallel programming due to the great advantages gained by utilizing all that Functional programming brings to the table and coupling this with all that Parallel programming brings to the table.

If your'e up for the challenge this is something I would take to serious task as a "begin to learn now so that you can be several steps ahead" when these two areas of computational study become the defacto-standards of our everyday programming environments.

Best of luck!