Erlang article #1 on programming.reddit.com

[Ryan Rawson]

> > I think this is where the misunderstanding came about.  Procedural looping
> > structures such as "for", "while", "do while", and "foreach" are the sorts of
> > looping constructs that would severely damage Erlang as a language, IMHO.
>
> Procedural looping constructs in a non-procedural language doesn't make much
> sense, which is why I'm not worried about someone trying to add them.

While you and I may agree that this doesn't make sense - the first
thing a developer does is try to make their new environment as
familiar and comfortable to them as possible.  So many developers are
seriously hung up on iteration as _THE_ way to do 90% of programming
tasks.  Someone will propose adding a for loop to Erlang, and the
trick is not to give in to the temptation.  Obviously just 1 person
complaining won't make a difference, but now imagine 50% of the
erlang-questions list constantly brings this up in every single
message.  This is a realistic future IMHO as Erlang continues to
improve in popularity.

Besides which, as everyone knows, Erlang isn't pure functional - what
is with the comma syntax?  Some sort of sequenced instructions....

:-)


-ryan