Comments on: You Have to Experience It

By: aleks

aleks — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:46:16 +0000

About Erlang: I am just in the process of reading “Programming Erlang” (currently at the chapter on file processing, next to go on to TCP/IP and then OTP) and I can testify that the language is amazing! So many things have been done the right way: lightweight processes, message passing as the only way to do interprocess communication, exceptions and fault-tolerance… I believe that whenever something is being introduced that is so different, there are going to be negative emotional reactions, probably because the society as the whole is divided into vested interests. For companies it is money, and for programmers it the time they spent learning what is now their favorite technology.

I remember how hard it was for me to decide to start learning C (that was waaay back!). How ugly its syntax was compared to Pascal!

This touches on some universal truth about human society – Darwin had to endure personal attacks for trying to challenge creationist views of the scientific community of the day, Einstein had a hard time to get physicists to accept his theory…

My point is that it is a waste of time arguing with people who try to start a flame war without knowing anything about the subject matter. It is even good that Erlang gets only this kind of negative reaction; that means that the language is promising and there is as yet nobody who has tried the learning it seriously but found it useless or faulty. For me, the question is whether Erlang is useful to make real-world software (which I am working on finding out for myself); how different from the mainstream it is is completely irrelevant. Ditto for TDD and REST.

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WSOAC#29 - REST Explained - Service Endpoint — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:58:29 +0000

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WSDAC#16 - Behind NBC’s Olympics Website - Service Endpoint — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:34:26 +0000

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By: Aristotle Pagaltzis

Aristotle Pagaltzis — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 03:29:37 +0000

Another example I face all the time: people who know nothing whatsoever about Perl except for the absolutely certain fact that it’s write-once spaghetti line noise.

By: Robert Virding

Robert Virding — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:20:44 +0000

@ali: Actually, all of the complaints about Erlang’s syntax that I’ve read have come from Lisp and Haskell programmers. (Possibly due in part to sample bias: I read Lisp blogs and drink beer with Haskell programmers.) To a Lisp programmer, hearing something is “very simple and regular when compared to popular general-purpose imperative languages” is not exactly reassuring!

I think you’re wrong there, most complaints I have seen about the Erlang syntax comes from Java/other OO programmers who complain that it doesn’t look like Java and who are worried that the world will come to an end because you can’t re-assign variables.

Sorry for sounding a bit bitter here but I don’t understand why people bother to learn another language if their primary complaint is that it doesn’t look like what they are used to. I mean, the reason for learning another language is that it *is* different. I am in the middle of learning Python (finally) just because it isn’t Erlang, or C. Real C, K&R C. :-)

Anyway for lisp programmers you can always use LFE, Lisp Flavoured Erlang, to get the benefits of both worlds.