> Concurrency has been a fairly well funded sector of compiler and PL research to the point of starving other arguably more important areas.
Concurrency is enormously important in a world where instruction speed has saturated. Many problems are highly data-coupled, so you can't just separate these problems into loose tasks that you connect with a slow message pipe.
Of course, if you're just writing a web server or a chat server, then you might be lucky and you can get away with it. But please don't assume this holds for everybody.
Yeah, but it's "just" speed of execution, while for most things the bottleneck of making something possible is correctness and ease of developing while keeping complexity in check. So yes it's important but still mostly less important than some others :)
Tensorflow is interesting in this respect. Leveraging a lot of parallelism and using a parallel pl under the good, while presenting itself as a dev friendly Python lib on the surface.
Wp has a list at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concurrent_and_paral...
Futhark is one of the more interesting recent parallel languages IMO since GPU languages were in such a lull for a while. Too bad everyone is stuck with emitting opencl or going vendor specific though.