Atomic ets

[Hal Snyder]

"Joe Armstrong (AL/EAB)" <joe.armstrong@REDACTED> writes:

>    Agggggggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
>
>    Verily verily verify I say untoo ye
>
>    Even thou thy hath vouchsafed a lock - and even though thy
> thath promest to delivery it back - there will come a day
> when the Great one will return and the lock will be raised
> and there will be much gnashing of teeth and wailing and
> the bones of the long dead will rise and dance on the graves
> of the unfrocked bishops.

One great appeal of Erlang has been its avoidance of the Slough of
(P)Threads and Mutexes into which my colleagues, many of whom are also
deeply into OOP, have disappeared for months at a time. I shudder
whenever purveyors of mutexes and other such evils make a run at the
unspoiled atoll that is OTP.

Once someone snidely asked "With all this concurrency, what are
Erlang's synchronization primitives", only to be crushed by the
simplicity of the response: "send and receive".