Impressions of Mozart-Oz

[James Hague]

>PS. Hindsight again, Joe pointed out to me
>another thing we did wrong. We pushed Erlang
>as a Declarative / Functional language. If we
>had played down these aspects and pushed it as
>a "concurrency oriented" language [...]

And though I hate to say it, if Erlang had a few more imperative features
then I expect there'd be less resistance to it.  For example, it can be
pretty tough to explain to someone why they can't have a global updateable
array, especially when that's a basic feature in just about every other
language out there.  Or that you can only have global variables in general
through the process dictionary, a feature the Erlang book strongly warns
against using.  It's difficult to find *any* program in Python, Perl,
Scheme, Lisp, Ruby, etc., that doesn't use globals for infrequently updated
variables.

James