Concepts that people find hard (was: Re: Meyer, OO and concurrency)

[Timur Irmatov]

On 14 Jul 2005 09:31:33 GMT, Michael Williams <mike@REDACTED> wrote:
> So it's not altogether suprising that Erlang wins ground only slowly. Not only
> are people subjected to the monster of concurrency, they also have to contend
> with a functional language at the same time. But once one has understood it, its
> hard to see how anyone can tolerate the mind boggling difficulties of trying to
> do concurrent programming in C++ combined with a wierd OS or middleware.

I came to Erlang less than a month ago. I work as system administrator
at small ISP and do some programming with python/perl. Recently I've
searched the internet for open-source SIP proxies. First I looked at
Partysip, then SER. And then I found YXA, written in Erlang. It had an
overview of it's design in terms of workers and supervisors, it seemed
interesting to me. Then I came to
http://www.erlang.org/white_paper.html.  That thing *really* blew my
mind.

I started to learn Erlang. The language really made me excited. I had
a little experience with C/C++/Java. It is really hard to read and
understand other people's code. That was completely different with
Erlang. I browsed the code of YXA and surprisingly noticed that it is
really possible to understand how everything works!

"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming,
is not worth knowing." (c) unknown.

May be the language is not suitable for some of embedded development,
but it is great for many other applications.


-- 
Timur Irmatov, JID: thor@REDACTED