[erlang-questions] Forget Erlang on the Java VM. More language on the Erlang VM are needed!

[Marten Feldtmann]

Thomas Lindgren schrieb:
> Alteon had the right mindset too: they saw Erlang not
> as a risk but as a competitive advantage. So, in
> essence: try to skip the risk-averse ...
>
> Best,
> Thoma
The same sentence can be heard in the Smalltalk community
again and again - but this is not really interesting in the
mainstream and it does not produce jobs very often.

I've heard a talk about a SAP group creating a working prototype
using Smalltalk for a problem in within one week where other groups
in SAP were working several month on it - without a solution.

Actually after getting the solution with several customers they
gave it to another group in SAP and to programmers in india to
reimplement the job in Java again.

Summary: good reputation, but that's it.

There were also discussions about putting Smalltalk on the JVM - most
of the people agree, that this might bring more Smalltalk developers
to the community - but also most of the people agree, that this will
also kill the technological advantages of Smalltalk - e.g. the
light processes within the image and the tremendous highly interactive
GUI.

I actually think, that success of languages are based either on
enormous financial power/interests (Microsoft, IBM, SUN) - or
on other issues like c syntax, flat source code managements like
CVS or Subversion, Eclipse - actually we have to deal with
programmers, which are mostly human beings. Life can be very
simple.

Marten