Language Bindings for Erlang Again (Opinion)

[Jeff Crane]

> > > Basically, it sounds like you are inventing
> > > problems
> > > where there aren't any. Why?

Erlang is not some utopian language. There must be
large or multiple problems to prevent adoption when
implementing the most trivial of tasks. First, Erlang
is not adopted because it is not exceptionally good at
satisfying basic project goals like speed,
maintainability, and efficiency. In small standalone
programs, it's unlikely that anyone would consider
Erlang over a purely interpreted language. As an
employer, it's near-impossible to find a person to
maintain or support my new Erlang project in any
State, much less my County. The amount of Erlang the
average programmer (me) needs to write to perform the
same work as 12 lines of ASP, is beyond reasonable.

The difficulty in bridging to other languages is what
stifles adoption within my peer group. I have no
examples of Erlang binding nicely to anything but C++.
A month of digging and posting in my free time (that
99% of Erlang dabblers will not bother with
regardless), I still dont have Erlang talking to
Python (which I'm also learning).

Personally, I'm using Erlang for its strengths. Is it
better than RakNet? It's certainly easier to
implement! and that's worth something...but it's not
exactly presented as a prototyping language.

I first bought into the advantages of Joel Reymont
when he presented findings through the OpenPoker
project. I also examined the criticisms, which were
never really addressed. Anyone can whip up a large
program that passes numbers around registers and point
out "see how fast it is". How scaleable, realtime, is
a large Erlang program? Where are the performance
tests over 100m of cat5? I'll test it myself and then
I'll know.

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