The future of programming is parallel. We have run out of ways to make processors faster, and instead we have to use many of them. Programming techniques and languages have not followed. In the words of a report by the National Research Council, parallel programming still requires “heroic programmers.” This TechTalk is focused on making parallel and concurrent programming accessible, even to the non-heroes among us. In fact, programming of any kind used to be the preserve of heroes, but progress in software technology made it possible to produce quality programs on a routine basis using well-documented engineering techniques such as (among others) OO principles. We will see how to extend this modern engineering approach to concurrent systems through the SCOOP mechanism (Simple Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming), an incremental extension to accepted OO techniques including Design by Contract.
Bertrand Meyer is CTO of Eiffel Software and a professor at Politecnico di Milano and Innopolis University. He is the author of several best-sellers on software topics. His work on SCOOP is supported by a Euro 2.5-million personal Advanced Investigator Grant of the European Research Council. He is an ACM Fellow and ACM Software System Award recipient.
