Published : Jan 11, 2010
NOT ON THE CURRENT EDITION
This blip is not on the current edition of the Radar. If it was on one of the last few editions, it is likely that it is still relevant. If the blip is older, it might no longer be relevant and our assessment might be different today. Unfortunately, we simply don't have the bandwidth to continuously review blips from previous editions of the Radar.
Understand more
Jan 2010
Assess
The remaining two language types included on the radar are often grouped together. While functional and concurrent languages may be adopted in similar environments, their approaches are different. Functional programming focuses on expressing code in the form of mathematical functions that avoid maintaining state across multiple invocations. While functional languages such as Haskell have been around for a number of years, new functional (themed) languages such as Scala, F# and Clojure have sparked some interest in this paradigm. Due to the way in which functional languages manage state, interest in these languages has increased by many developers seeking to make the most out of multi-core processors. Many concurrent languages are also functional languages. The distinction lies in the emphasis on running operations in parallel. A number of such languages exist; Erlang is currently the most popular of these languages. Concurrent languages commonly provide some means for handling concurrency by using messages to communicate across multiple threads.
