[erlang-questions] Why is Erlang what it is?

[Ulf Wiger]

Den 2006-12-14 23:45:12 skrev Serge Aleynikov <serge@REDACTED>:

> t ty wrote:
>> My intro to FP was via Haskell and prior to that I used Eiffel. I'm a
>> fan of static typing however I haven't seen empirical evidence
>> supporting the statement that static typing reduces testing. To be
>> fair Dominic did say *might*.
> I haven't seen such evidence either.  Perhaps it is hard to find because
> from the industrial point of view quite rare (if any at all) to find a
> company that would actively use multiple languages (such as Haskell,
> OCaml, Erlang, C++, Java, etc) for product development, and do such a
> comparative analysis.

Mats Cronquist mentioned his paper on debugging at the SIGPLAN workshop
in Snowbird. One of the memorable lines from that paper were that "there
were very few coding bugs. Most bugs were a working implementation of
the wrong thing." (quoting from memory). I think that such bugs are often
difficult to find in testing as well, since we tend to test that the
system conforms to our (possibly erroneous) understanding of what is
supposed to happen. A very good way to avoid falling into that trap,
I think, is using QuickCheck.

Using QuickCheck and Dialyzer, I think you'll be able to shake out
most bugs fairly quickly.

BR,
Ulf W

-- 
Ulf Wiger