[erlang-questions] Continuing this thread much longer -- crazy? Or just crazy?

[Vasilij Savin]

Hej Michael,

It looks like a very good summary to me.

Regards,
Vasilij Savin


On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 12:03 PM, Michael Turner <leap@REDACTED> wrote:

>
> I think we've drifted somewhat from the topic I started.  Mea culpa -- I
> forked it into an IDE-for-Erlang discussion, and my subject line perhaps
> lent itself to eventual flaming on almost religious topic in software
> engineering, from high level methodology to the One True Editor.
>
> Still, there have been a number of good points brought up, and I'll
> probably summarize soon, perhaps writing some of you privately first to
> make sure I'm not misrepresenting your point of view.  My tentative
> conclusions at this point:
>
> - Erlang as a first language is a concept that ought to be tried.
>
> - The IDE-for-Erlang issue, if I address it at all in my tutorial
> materials, might be deferred until after I've had a chance to test the
> idea out on some willing subjects.
>
> - Configuring Emacs with Erlang tool support still seems worth pursuing
> and trying out on the target audience at some point relatively soon (on
> the order of months).
>
> - Eclipse looks more distant.  Perhaps because it's written in Java,
> I've long felt that professional Java programmers are its de facto
> target audience, even if it's nominally language-agnostic.  My target
> audience isn't professional programmers at all.
>
> Just to be sure: my idea was really to teach Erlang to cognitive
> scientists and cognitive linguists, so that they could support their own
> modeling efforts.  It was not to turn them into full-fledged software
> engineers.  (Issues of GUI and DBMS support might be farmed out to
> people writing in other languages and interfacing to the researchers'
> models.)  My initial subject line didn't express this qualification
> very well, but I was hoping people would read the rest of my e-mail for
> context, and (lucky me) a number of you actually did.
>
> If you'd like to continue discussion of Emacs as great/good/stupid/evil,
> or about how only a poor craftsman blames his tools, or about how you
> learned C++ just from reading a reference manual for it on a desert
> island, then got a compiler for it running after you discovered an old
> Ukrainian Ural 666 Mark II running aboard a Soviet freighter that had
> run aground on the other side of the island, whose crew had long since
> been rescued, your compiler being implemented by writing it out in
> machine code, in tiny chalk numerals, on some blackboards in the
> captain's cabin, after which you toggled it in through the front panel
> ... well, be my guest.  But with a new and unrelated subject line,
> please.
>
> -michael turner
>
>
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