A Joeish Erlang distribution (long)

[Joe Armstrong]

  The whole idea of the OTP  design principles was to a make a "common
way  of doing  things" for  large programming  teams (i.e.  2  or more
programmers).

  If you  have 20 programmers on  the same projects  is is desirable,
indeed beneficial if they don't all waltz off and invent their own way
of writing client-servers, loggers etc.

  If you have one man projects  - done by the people who invented half
the things in the language - this is not necessary.

  If you're a one man project and you start from scratch - you could:

	1) - spend 20 years thinking about it
	2) - start hacking immediately
	3) - read the OTP documentation and use the design principles

  Id recommend 2) followed by 3)  then 1) - after about 5-10 years you
should  be able  to "roll  your own",  I've had  some 25  odd  years of
serious "warming  up" and  I still don't  know how to  write beautiful
code :-)

  << Sometimes I think it's  time to write 

	"Programming made difficult in 25 years"

     Me, I hate all the "Learn SQL in 20 minutes" type books -

     something that takes 20 minutes to learn can't be worth learning.

  Programming   is  *difficult*  and   takes  a   long  time   to  get
right. Simple  and transparently  correct algorithms are  difficult to
write - making  them correct is the difficult bit  - indeed vast teams
of  mathematicians could  spend  decades trying  to  prove the  simplest
program I write correct. >>


  /Joe