preview copy of a new Erlang FAQ

[Michael C Williams]

> Mike Williams, one of Erlang's original developers, is fond of
> saying "If you don't run experiments before you start designing
> your system, your entire system will be an experiment". 

Should be: "If you don't run experiments before you start
designing _a new system_ system, your entire system will be an
experiment"

> Large systems which spent most of their time communicating
> with other systems, recovering from faults and making complex
> decisions run at about the same speed as equivalent C programs. 

At the same speed, or faster than equivalent C programs.

> Beginners typically over-estimate the cost of processes
> and message passing. 

I think it is the other way round. Beginners _underestimate_ he
cost of processes and message passing. But in 30 years of
programming expereince, I have seldom met anybody who has
overestimated the execution time of any larger program!


On Sun, 20 Feb 2000 Matthias.Lang@REDACTED wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> After the last open-source release, I resolved to go through the 
> Erlang FAQ and update it. Somewhere along the way I added a
> few questions which seemed to pop up every so often on this mailing
> list and now it's grown:
> 
> http://www.ericsson.se/cslab/~mml/faq/
> 
> I intend to put this up on the erlang.org site, but before I organise
> that, I'd appreciate if people here took a look through it. In 
> particular
> 
>    * Those of you who were quoted (Per on Question 11.8, Mike on 
>      question 5.10 and Joe on 11.7) might want to check I'm not
>      putting words in your mouth
> 
>    * There are a few calls for information spread around
> 
>    * I'm interested in suggestions for questions to be removed,
>      added, reworded or corrected. 
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Matthias
>      
>