[erlang-questions] "Erlang, the next Java"

[Chris Wong]

I enjoy this article.  Thanks for forwarding.

As much as I like to focus on the positive aspects of Erlang, there  
are at least a couple short-comings of Erlang.  One of them are  
mentioned by Ralph Johnson in this article; Erlang doesn't have a  
large company behind it.  Second, I heard a lot that distributed  
Erlang doesn't scale in a large distributed environment with  
thousands of machine.  I personally don't have any experience to  
assert it one way or the other.

Both have been used by anti-Erlang camp.  It makes it really hard to  
advocate Erlang in a large company.  For example, in a large  
ccompany, there is usually a large investment already to solve the  
large distributed computing problem in Java or C++.  The usual  
argument is that the tested and proven home-grown solution should be  
used instead despite how much concurrency gain you'd have using Erlang.

It's a huge disappointment for me and a touch battle to fight.

What are the mitigation for such short-comings in Erlang?

Thanks for any insight.

Chris

On Aug 9, 2007, at 3:25 PM, Thomas Lindgren wrote:

> http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/ralph/blogView? 
> showComments=true&entry=3364027251
>
> Ralph Johnson (gang of four) praises Erlang in a
> longish review of Joe's book. Great stuff from a
> veteran; here is the payoff:
>
> "Erlang is going to be a very important language. It
> could be the next Java. Its main problem is that there
> is no big company behind it. Instead, it is being
> pushed as an open source project. Its main advantage
> is that it is perfectly suited for the multi-core, web
> services future. In fact, it is the ONLY mature,
> rock-solid language that is suitable for writing
> highly scalable systems to run on multicore machines.
>
> ...
>
> I do not believe that other languages can catch up
> with Erlang anytime soon. It will be easy for them to
> add language features to be like Erlang. It will take
> a long time for them to build such a high-quality VM
> and the mature libraries for concurrency and
> reliability. So, Erlang is poised for success. If you
> want to build a multicore application in the next few
> years, you should look at Erlang."
>
> Best,
> Thomas
>
>
>
>
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