Software and Concurrency
As I was doing research for a paper, I hunted down Herb Sutter's article The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Towards Concurrency in Software to find some passages that supported my thesis. There was quite a buzz about this article when it appeared in Dr. Dobb's Journal and C/C++ Users Journal earlier this year, as it seemed to capture and clearly explain the feeling so many people had been getting while watching what the CPU manufacturers have been doing lately. Everything's going multi-core, even video game processors.
Following a few links, I found that Sutter has written (with James Larus) another article on the subject, this time with a greater focus on software. It's Software and the Concurrency Revolution at the ACM Queue, and it's a broad look at the deficiencies of current programming languages and practices in the face of concurrency, and what sort of changes need to be made to face the future he sees, in which individual processor cores don't get much faster than they are today.
I'm convinced that Sutter's take on the future is at least mostly right, and these articles ought to be required reading for anyone who wants to take up or continue writing software.
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