(OT) rebuttal against "Why OO Sucks

Vance Shipley vances@REDACTED
Mon May 26 21:23:32 CEST 2003


Glamour.  Hmmm...

Maybe we should write up some of the philosphies and features of
Erlang with the direct intent of glamourizing it.  The telco
hardening perspective, although very attractive to me, does the
opposite as telephone companies are seen as slow, stodgy, old 
fashioned and obsolete (laughably).  As has been discussed here
before a focus on Erlang as a "concurrent programming language"
is great.

I have been thinking a lot lately of the "let if fail" philosophy.
In the beginning my code was written defensively but over time I
began to understand the Erlang world better and without really
thinking too much about it the defensiveness started to go away.
After having given it some specific attention over the last few
months I now am writing much better code.  Once you have embraced
this concept/philosophy/coding-style your code gets smaller,
easier to understand and much more functional.  How do we glamorize
this?  I guess any talk of "failure" is hard to make sexy. :)

I see that Limbo has added exception handling to the core language.

[http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/4e/limbo1.html]:
} 
} We have added exception handling to the Limbo language, replacing
} sys->rescue etc. This is intended to make it more straightforward
} to write fault-tolerant subsystems. The semantics broadly follow
} that used by the programming language CLU. There are many advantages:
} it is structured and fits into the language rather than being bolted
} on; the programmer, compilers and JIT can see the scope of exception
} handlers, allowing the system (for instance) to nil out values in the
} block on an exception, and get register allocation right; and the
} implementation is better. The source changes to Limbo applications
} are relatively small, and the result is tidier.
} Status:Implemented


	-Vance



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