Eric Verhulst on Parallel Programming

I enjoyed reading and learnt from Eric Verhulst's letter in the November 2007 issue of the Embedded System Design magazine.

There he writes:

"There will never be a real 'parallel' language. Actually what people mean is a compiler that turns a sequential program into a parallel one. In the best case, we will have something like the parallizing FORTRAN compilers. These compilers look for the loops and the split them over multiple processors. The issue is that one can never extract more parallelism than was originally put in the program. For a lot of scientific programs or even for some graphic applications there is some potential, but for most applications the potential is very limited. Even then, a lot more parallelism could be found if a parallzing compiler was not an exercise in reverse engineering. The original problems often have a lot of real-world parallelism. e.g. fluid dynamics code starts from a model where millions of small "voxels" and their interactions are integrated to obtain a sequential code. in the process, the "parallel" information gets lost."

And in the latest issue of SD Times Andrew Binstock has observed that:

"The vendors most concerned with promoting threading on the desktop—that is, chip vendors whose future is closely tied to capitalizing on multiple cores—are slowly but inevitably coming to a disappointing conclusion: Desktop developers are not interested in threading. And no amount of flag waving or promotion is going to persuade them to adopt threads."

I wonder then if it is worth learning Haskell, F#, or Erlang?