
Maybe Monads Might Not Matter - raganwald
http://gbracha.blogspot.com.au/2011/01/maybe-monads-might-not-matter.html
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marshray
I thought this [http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2011/01/maybe-monads-might-
not-m...](http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2011/01/maybe-monads-might-not-
matter.html?showComment=1296027246940#c6671808644893652655) was a fantastic
comment.

 _Sending a message on a channel usually costs at least a compare-and-swap or
memory fence. This limits their applicability to things above a certain
granularity [...] even in Erlang or Scala actors, you wind up passing around
lists and other concrete data structures, because it isn't worth constructing
those queues _everywhere_._

So when is a distributed program's internal communication and IO the right
level of granularity?

Network IO would seem to be a familiar instance of an Actor model and should
map directly.

Interestingly, Intel's new Xeon Phi chip
[http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/12/a-look-at-the-xeon-phi-
ca...](http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/12/a-look-at-the-xeon-phi-cards-and-
hardware/) "looks like a cluster of x86 servers that are on a TCP/IP network,
and takes almost no programming expertise to port to."

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raganwald
A comprehensive discussion on proggit;
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/f8b1u/maybe_mon...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/f8b1u/maybe_monads_might_not_matter/)

