There’s been some weird synchronicity going on recently. It started a few weeks back at work. Earlier this year I wrote a compiler for Javascript, and this resulted in a conversation with a workmate about virtual machines. I mentioned the SECD machine and Henderson’s seminal book from 1980 on functional programming. My workmate was interested enough to order a copy, and we’ve had a number of conversations about functional programming (which I haven’t done in 20 years). At some point in this process I ended up getting the Google paper on map/reduce, and the paper on a history of Haskell. A few days later Joel wrote about map/reduce and Javascript on his blog. Then I ended up almost inadvertently getting a copy of Danny Hillis’ Connection Machine book. Today I read Eric Sink’s posting about multicore CPUs and Erlang, in which he also mentioned Larry O’Briens blog - so I head over there and the third posting down discusses a problem very similar to the deadlock issue I just posted about.
Who knows what it all means? Maybe its time to learn F#…