Erlang use in Italy

[Ulf Wiger]

Den 2005-04-10 20:33:48 skrev Peter-Henry Mander  
<erlang@REDACTED>:

> Unfortunately trying to explain the benefits of Erlang concurrent
> programming to someone more versed in C or any other low level language,
> they will often take each individual feature in isolation and reply "so
> what? I can do that too in C." Of course you can, but there's more
> effort involved, its more error prone, and it takes much longer to get
> it to work correctly. If you follow their reasoning to it's absurd
> conclusion, you may as well write all programs in binary digits without
> the aid of compilers. That's what programs are compiled into after all!


Reading http://www.galois.com/methods.php, you come across this
justification for using a higher-level programming language:

"All programming languages suffer from a semantic gap: once the
developer has worked out how to solve a problem, they have to
translate that solution into the concrete syntax of the programming
language. In traditional languages, such as C, C++, and Java, the
semantic gap is large, and the translation is error-prone and
time-consuming. In comparison, functional languages, such as Haskell,
ML, and Caml, allow developers to express their ideas relatively
directly. The rest of the translation is handled by the compiler,
and is governed by strict, mathematical principles. By removing the
ad-hoc, error-prone, time-consuming translation step, functional
languages enable developers to produce correct code in a fraction
of the time."

Not that it will impress macho programmers, but perhaps it can
be used in order to try to explain things to people who have
to deal with programmers, and wonder why software development
is such a beast to manage.

/Uffe