Well the PS3 has 9 cores, or something like that. Don't you think that says something about the computers we'll all be using, and by extension, the parallel-processing capabilities we'll have to take advantage of in the future? Personally, I'd rather not learn Erlang either, but I hope that this sort of easy parallel processing becomes one of those popular features that every language will implement sooner or later. Hm, I wonder if it should be part of Arc's core...
The "eventually everything will be massively parallel" argument is not very convincing. The Be guys made this argument 15 years ago and we're only now getting to where they were back then (2/4 processor cores). Consumers aren't that excited by more cores, and developers still don't know what to do with them. So there is massive investment in advancing the status quo.
Sony thought they could impose the PS3's multiprocessing regime on game developers through market force. But developers found the programming overhead unmanageable, which led to a less-than-compelling lineup, which failed to interest consumers, which means that now developers just work on the Xbox 360 version and port to PS3.
I was offered a job porting an existing game engine to the PS3 under the gun (the game had to ship in six months) and I would not touch it with a ten-foot pole.
"and developers still don't know what to do with them."
Excuse me, at least in the imaging processing community we know very well what to do with all those extra cores. Particularly when processing 1 Gb images, and/or a couple hundred thousand 2048x2048 16-bit images.
