The Need for… Functional Programming
A Hardware Issue Became a Software Problem
During the last decades we are all witnesses of computer systems constantly improving in speed, efficiency, increasing space for storing data and decreasing the size of the components. The popular Moore’s law was a correct prediction that the number of transistors of the largest microprocessors will double about every two years, since 1970s. But increasing the number of transistors on a chip and increasing processor’s frequency, among other things, also requires exponentially more power.
Processors were originally developed with only one core. Around 2005, in order to continue delivering regular performance improvements for general-purpose processors, manufacturers such as Intel and AMD have turned to multi-core designs, sacrificing lower manufacturing-costs for higher performance in some applications and systems. (source Wikipedia)
Traditionally, computer software has been written for serial computation. To solve a problem, an algorithm is constructed and implemented as a serial stream of instructions, executed one at a time. In order to use the resources of a multi-core processor, some kind of parallel or concurrent execution approach became a need. Suddenly, due to the change applied by hardware manufacturers, software developers must rethink the design of their programs.