Things I Learned from ACCU 2010

[Walter Bright]

* Not all functional programming languages do concurrency well. Haskell and 
OCaml in particular have severe fundamental problems with it such that 
parallelizing your code makes it slower. Erlang and Clojure parallelize well, in 
that performance scales up proportionally as cores are added.

* The future of multi-core hardware is to not have any shared memory, each core 
will have its own address space. Message passing looks like the future.

* Monads have nothing in particular to with I/O. All monads are are a way to 
insert code to pre-process arguments going to a function, and insert code to 
post-process the result coming out of that function.

* Probably nobody understands how to use C++0x atomics correctly, or ever will.

* People really understand and get testing and how it improves programming.