[erlang-questions] Is it worth commenting this guy?

[Robert Virding]

As I commented earlier I won't bother to reply to him on his site, as
everyone has said it isn't worth it. But I would like to comment one of his
claims.

He is extremely against algorithms and sequential languages because they are
sequential. Even Erlang is too sequential for him as within each process
things are done sequentially.

Around the same time we were developing Erlang we were also looking at the
parallel logic languages Parlog and Strand as one alternative language type
to use. They are extremely parallel and communication between processes is
easy using lazy lists. The trouble is that they are TOO parallel as
everything, literally everything, every little computation, is a separate
process. The world, however, even though it is parallel does expect things
to happen in a certain order, so using these languages you had to work to
sequentialise them so they did things in the right order. This was tedious
and could easily lead to strange errors when you got it wrong.

We found then, as now, that Erlang's level of parallelism is neither too hot
nor too cold but just right.

Just a little comment,

Robert

P.S. I must say that I liked playing with these languages and they were a
lot of fun. I even did an implementation of Erlang in Strand using Strand as
an "assembler language" to which Erlang was compiled. It worked but gave no
benefit over the JAM. It's described in a Strand book.


On 28/08/07, Robert Virding <rvirding@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> When scanning for references to Erlang I occasionally come across this
> guy:
>
> http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/
>
> He is advocating/developing a system called COSA and continually comparing
> it to Erlang. While I appreciate the references I personally think he is a
> bit bonkers and just not getting it. Do you think it is worth getting into a
> discussion with him and try to correct him where he is wrong? Has anyone
> tried?
>
> Robert
>
>
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