Recently Erlang is gaining a lot of popularity, probably due to the publishing of the Programming Erlang book from the Pragmatic Programmer. In this article about the Erlang future, Joe Armstrong explaing why Erlang Concurrency Oriented Programming will be much more important from now on, since we’re moving to a multi core processing era!

Nobody can predict the future, but I’m going to make a few informed guesses.

Let’s suppose Intel is right: let’s suppose that the Keifer project succeeds. If this happens, then 32 core processors will appear on the market as soon as 2009/2010.

This comes as no surprise; Sun already ships the Niagara with 8 cores running 4 hyperthreads per core (which is equivalent to 32 cores).

This is a development that makes Erlang programmers very happy. They have been waiting 20 years for this to happen, and now it’s payback time.

Here’s the good news for Erlang programmers:

Your Erlang program should just run N times faster on an N core processor