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Yup. The new multi-core processors are going to start demanding more language support for parallel computation. It's the elephant in the programmer's break room that nobody seems to want to talk about. But if you want to exploit modern processors you simply can't code the way it's always been done before.

To this end I'm surprised Java hasn't become even more of a buzzword because it natively supports multithreading. It's going to be interesting to see which language becomes the new adopted standard in controlling the new multi-core systems.

Erlang is another language I've seen mentioned for parallelism. It's designed that way. The syntax may seem unusual because it's descended more from the functional languages (think ML, Haskell) than the Algol line, but becoming able to switch to that different way of thinking is worth it. Who knows whether it will catch on or not.