Maybe Erlang is OO after all?

[Joe Armstrong]

I have been reliably informed that maybe Erlang *is* OO after all.

The argument goes like this:

The two most important things in OO reasoning are:

	- isolation, and,
	- polymorphism

  All the other  stuff - inheritance etc pales  into insignificance in
comparison.

  Isolation  is needed  to implement  true  objects -  they *must*  be
isolated processes are  a very good approximation to  true objects (in
as much as two Erlang processes are fairly well isolated)

  We  can easily set-up  polymorphic protocols  to processes  and write
polymorphic functions (like lists:sort) - why is polymorphism so nice
it make programming so much easier - all objects obey the same protocol
(at some level of abstraction).

 Thus it might be argued that:

	- Erlang *is* OO
	and
	- Erlang is *more* OO than any of the other so called OO languages

  Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

  Cheers

/Joe