5 second Erlang Submission

[David Hopwood]

Michael Williams wrote:
> In article <47404.194.72.110.12.1156409962.squirrel@REDACTED>,
>  gordonguthrie@REDACTED (Gordon Guthrie) writes:
> |> Erlang was designed by people who build products. All other languages were
> |> designed by people who build languages. Do you build products?
> |> 
> |> If it is over 5 secs lose the last sentence...
> 
> C was designed at Bell Labs, and it first use was in ESS#4
> telephony switches and in UNIX. C is an excellent language for its
> purpose, [...]

I would dispute that. The system programming domain that C is supposedly
intended for requires extremely high reliability even in the presence of
software errors. Many of the design decisions in C (in particular the
prevalence of undefined behaviour resulting from common programming
mistakes) run directly counter to that.

I actually quite like C; it's at least a consistent exemplar of the
"worse is better" design philosophy. But I don't consider it to be an
"excellent" language for any purpose.

-- 
David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood@REDACTED>