Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Google not functional?

There has been some discussion in the blogsphere lately as to what the Next Big Programming Language might be. At the same time the functional programming camp has been stressing that with the advent of multicore CPUs functional languages will find their way into mainstream programming because they make it easier to write thread-safe programs (being side effect free and all that).

It was interesting to read that Google's internal choice of programming languages (C++, Java, Python and JavaScript) does not include FP (JavaScript has first-class functions, but it lacks other caractheristics to make it a full-flagged functional language).

Surely if anyone would benefit from FP for massively parallel computation it would be Google?

1 comments:

Julio said...

;) Image telling this to your employer design review committee ..."Er-what?". (Unless you worked for Ericsson)

I think google approaches this with MapReduce:
http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce

It looks like they're trying to add functors/closures as part of Java 7.0:
http://gafter.blogspot.com/2006/08/closures-for-java.html