[erlang-questions] Ideas for a new Erlang

[Bob Calco]

BTW....
> 
> > So we have a thesis, and an antithesis, and it's time to look for the
> > synthesis.
> 
> That's way too Hegelian for me at this time of night.. er, morning!
> (12:09 AM EST)
> 
> I once doubted my political philosophy background would come in handy
> one day. Whoddathunk it'd be today, on this subject, in this forum?
> 
> :)
> 
> - Bob
> 
> Clearly, whether 'receive' is easy or hard to understand
> > could depend on and presumably does depend on some factors such as
> >   - one's willingness to read the documentation
> >   - one's ability to read the documentation
> >   - one's experience with other notations such as CSP, Ada, Occam,
> >     TTCN-3 (where 'receive' can do some limited pattern matching,
> >     which when combined with 'alt' gives you a 'selective receive'
> >     that I will admit to be tricky), &c
> >   - whether one learned Erlang from a book or from a course,
> >   - in the latter case, whether the teacher understood 'receive'
> >     him/herself
> >   - and whether the teacher TAUGHT the students that 'receive' was
> >     difficult, the way many people teach that recursion is difficult,
> >     and many school maths teachers teach that "maths is too hard"
> >   - whether one has used profiling tools that report match attempts
> >     in receives, as well as match successes (_are_ there such tools?)
> >
> > The only evidence I have to help me decide here is that the
> > information is not just there in the documentation, it's lying right
> > on the surface, very hard to miss.

I have the same opinion about the so-called 'law' of comparative advantage,
which since Samuelson's textbook on economics has been TAUGHT to be
"irrefutable"... yet one need only read Smith's Invisible Hand passage in
the original (not as quoted by Samuelson!), and think about the problem as
stated for approx. 2 seconds, to find the folly of Ricardo's little joke.

But what do I know? I'm just a programmer...

- Bob