I've been doing a little reading lately on Erlang.  It's a functional language that offers a nifty set of abstractions useful for parallel programming, among other things and, while I can immediately appreciate its power, I'm reluctant to get too far into it because it represents a kind of significant departure for me in terms of both syntax and supported platforms (Erlang heavily favors Unix, although there is a runtime port for Windows, and Eclipse offers some IDE support to Windows users).  Additionally, Erlang is *extremely* strict about evaluation and assignment, disallowing any global state or multiple assignment to registers.  While I appreciate the purity of its intent, it's a little too much for me in everyday practice.  Of course, I'll keep playing with it anyway...

At the same time, I've been reading about the Parallel Extensions for .Net (Framework 3.5) and the activity on F# (a managed functional language similar in some respects to Erlang).  Between the Parallel Extensions' message-based task system and excellent additions like PLINQ (parallel LINQ), and F#'s functional approach, I think there may be something worth investigating further here.

I don't have all the details yet - very few, in fact - but I've seen enough to spend a little more time learning about this stuff.  More as the story unfolds.