A revolution in our midst (Score 1)

It's hard to appreciate, but we are in the middle of a revolution. High-performance, multi-core computing has made significant progress in the last few years and it's causing a lot of headache for software developers who try to exploit the potential power available. Multi-threaded programming does not bring a solution to the masses - understanding and preventing the issues arising from concurrency requires a lot of exposure to it.

The young generation of programmers have the confidence to try out multi-core programming, but only because they yet lack the painful experience of doing it. Whilst hardware is running away towards 100 cores in 5 years time and still keeping up with Moore's "Law", software is sadly lacking such advances. There's a very good white paper over on the 2 Cubed website about the problem The Multicore Revolution and a new framework just out called infoQuanta which looks intersting.

Meanwhile, Sun is tackling the problem from within the language. They've got Fortress Fortress which has a certain Java/C syntax about it. I haven't used it but I would say that it doesn't look like the 21st Century solution that's going to advance software development significantly.