For those of you coming to PDC’09 in Los Angeles a couple of weeks from now, I’ll be there for a few hours on Monday and Wednesday participating in two events:
- Patterns of Parallel Programming: A Tutorial on Fundamental Patterns and Practices for Parallelism. The full-day tutorial is full of useful information. I’ll be giving the first hour or so as an intro/overview; if you’ve seen my high-level concurrency talks you’ll recognize much of it, but it’ll also have a slant toward patterns of course to set up the day. The rest of the tutorial will be presented by my colleagues Richard Ciapata, Ade Miller, and Stephen Toub.
- Panel: Microsoft Perspectives on the Future of Programming. This one’s going to be a blast. You can judge just from the names of my heavyweight fellow panelists: Butler Lampson, Burton Smith, Don Box, Erik Meijer, and Jeffrey Snover. Anytime you get a chance to watch or attend a talk by any of these, do. If you get a chance to come to this panel when they’re all on one stage, definitely do. As Bill Shatner might put it: “Do. Not Miss!”
See you at PDC!
Sutter’s Mill 
I like your final point about how optimizations/performance will eventually become really important again. I think it may happen way sooner than the end of Moore’s law though! Almdahl’s law is a performance wall that’s approaching faster than the end of Moore’s law, so I think by the time we have to worry about Moore’s law ending we will be well beyond the “who cares about performance, computers are fast!” attitudes of some current languages.
I wrote up a short blog post about this here: http://sebastiansylvan.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!4469F26E93033B8C!175.entry