Hunch: as hardware (multi-core) improves, we will not achieve a sudden breakthrough that enables us to run conventional software approaches on it (functional, imperative or otherwise). Clever people have been anticipating and investigating multi-core for decades, without result, apart from the "embarrassingly parallelizable". In later decades, actual multi-core hardware was adopted in leading-edge then mainstream applications: in supercomputers; in server farms (esp google); in GPUs. Mainstream desktop CPUs have been multi-core for a decade now; and, today, as the article indicates, even phones are multi-core. Phones.
In the big picture, multi-core instead will slowly become good enough to solve problems suited to it, that couldn't be solved easily or cheaply before, such as massive simulation in non-government/military applications, and including problems that we did not even see as "problems" before, they seemed so insoluble.
It will be a new golden age of computation, with utterly different concepts, approaches and values from today. Our current issues of programming languages will disappear, pushed down to a lower level, and compared to it, imperative and functional programming will be as twins.
In the big picture, multi-core instead will slowly become good enough to solve problems suited to it, that couldn't be solved easily or cheaply before, such as massive simulation in non-government/military applications, and including problems that we did not even see as "problems" before, they seemed so insoluble.
It will be a new golden age of computation, with utterly different concepts, approaches and values from today. Our current issues of programming languages will disappear, pushed down to a lower level, and compared to it, imperative and functional programming will be as twins.