A Joeish Erlang distribution (long)

[Roger]

I'm an erlang newbie. I think the language and it's distribution have a lot of potential. I would not suggest to take any of the packages out at this point. I would consider mnesia to be one of the killer apps of erlang. Try and create your own persistent (and even replicated) database in java or anything else, good luck, goodbye :-)

I would definitly loose the OTP references though. It scared me ! When you talk about how it runs the routers in the various telecom companies, it causes all kinds of misconceptions. 

I would market erlang as a distributed, fault tolerant, send and pray semantics functional language. (Joe, did I miss anything). 

The main complaint I would have is that it doesn't have multibyte support. Other than that, I think it's pretty darn good.  
Wrt documentation, it would be great if all the pdf doc could zipped for download somewhere on the Erlang website (currently it's on a file by file basis, and web spiders don't work either).
Another point of advocay, we should rank higher on the shootout list :-)
http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/

anyway, just my ramblings ..

-Roger


> >I would suggest that the core package be even
> >more limited.  All you really need to run Erlang
> >is erts, kernel and stdlib. 
> 
> Basic stuff like compiler and parsetools are pretty lightweight, and useful.
> It would be annoying, I think, if the core Erlang package was no good for
> development and you had to grab an additional small package in order to
> compile code.  And, okay, like parsetools :)  But I agree that mnesia should
> be moved out of the core.  It's far from lightweight, and it's certainly not
> something that most people use.
> 
> Isn't the crypto module semi-obsolete, because the MD5 digest functions have
> been added as BIFs?
> 
>