I can see it now. Its in the future, probably two years out, maybe more, but its clear to me even Today. I met some folks. I listened to what they said. I made a few choices with a multi-year pay off. So far, so good.
Technology trends, at least in my small corner of the world, appear stable for at least the next five years.
I didn’t follow hardware trends much until a few months ago when one of my machines went down. Hardware trends are pretty easy to read. I have a new Nehalem i7 720 on order. It cost a few bucks, but my private cloud in a box is on a UPS truck somewhere.
Scale it? you bet. Haswell: double the cores, double the threads by default in 2013.
Luckily a year ago I made a good choice in programming languages: Haskell. Language trends are harder to read. Think there’s a practical use for Second order Lambda Calculus with Polymorphism? I do. Category theory is embedded in the core libraries of the language which makes incorporating information flow and the logical environment of the Information Flow Framework a natural fit.
I’ve been active recently on the Object Management Group’s Architecture Ecosystem Special Interest Group (AE-SIG) as well as the Ontolog Forum’s Sharing and Integrating Ontologies (SIO-Dev) activity.
I’ll take type inference, theorems for free and the EU funded CASL in HETS.
But wait, there’s more.
Software transactional memory and shared memory parallelism in a pure functional programming language.
In the immortal words of Hannibal Smith: “I love it when a plan comes together.”
