Name: Anonymous 2015-03-04 8:27
I think that Functional Programming is almost as much of a hoax as Artificial Intelligence. I have yet to see an interesting piece of code that comes from these FP people.
You're still not making a point. Many simulation libraries double-buffer their world, or fine-grainedly allocate new numeric structures as they mutate.You're point being? It's still not pure functional as far as the program is concerned. The algorithm may be pure but the programming language thinks you are mutating the old buffer.
(including pipelined message passing)These are provided as primitives. You can't build new primitives for concurrency in the language. You are stuck with what the implementaiton gives you, and if you need something better, you need to extend the implementation in an impure language.
The parallel situations FP can tackle are the hard ones.FP just makes parallel dead easy. Then again, what kind of parallel computing are we talking about? FP is good for multicore shared memory situations but it's not so suitable for a cluster of computers that communicate over a LAN. At that level message passing which translate to packets becomes more suitable, and this is not pure functional. Computers change their state as they carry out computations and talk to one another. So whether or not FP alone can help you depends a lot on what problem you are tackling and what computational resources you have at your disposal. The intelligent way to go about solving the problem is to consider all options and techniques. Find an abstraction that suits the restrictions of your computational resources and can express you problem you want to solve. But if you are restricted by ideology, you will only consider the techniques allowed by your ideology. This is a reminder to keep ideology inside of religious institutions and outside of your programs.