Tech bits for the weekend

I track a lot of technology feeds and trends, and generally about weekly I try to go through and highlight new things of interest. I like to write up things that look like trends, and I'm pleased to put them out FYI if you're interested.

Two goodies struck me this weekend:

F# to ship as part of Visual Studio 2010.

I've always liked scripting languages, but in the distant past computer cycles were too scarce, and web-era languages like Perl are syntactically ugly enough that I consider them "write-only" languages. Python and Ruby strike me as the first of a new generation -- reasonably elegant, and reasonably fast. I like ScottGu's take on some of Microsoft's steps drawn from this area, and these articles have a bit more on what the fuss might be about: The Rise of the Functional Paradigm, 6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use.

Khronos Releases OpenCL Spec.

This one's a bit obscure. I'm writing this note on a new MacBook Pro, which Apple (in Steve Jobs' wisdom) decided it needed not 1 but 2 GPUs (aside from the CPU, which can also be pressed to handle graphics tasks). Why would Apple waste about $50 in materials costs per-box on a component nobody but hardcore gamers really needs? Fast video decoding is one answer, OpenGL and OpenCL are the other. One of the GPUs in my MacBook has 16 cores, and OpenCL (coming with the next MacOSX - SnowLeopard) is supposed to provide a standard way to use general-purpose GPUs to accelerate "regular" processing.

The key here is not that this is “an interesting new Apple development” — GPU/multicore/acceleration is popping up everywhere.
What's exciting is the thought that processing and JavaScript accelerations in modern browsers may make use of video in web apps much more common, and possibly really close the look-and-feel gap between desktop apps and web apps.