[erlang-questions] Benchmarks

[Vasilij Savin]

Hello,

I would like to comment on a few points mentioned by Fred.

Regards,
Vasilij Savin


I think Erlang is trailing behind a bit in that respect. The site looks
> outdated (at least there's a new one being prepared), the doc still uses
> frames (see http://erldocs.com for a modern model), etc.


Javadocs use them as well. I do not think it is that big issue though.


> These subjects have
> been mentioned many times and things are getting done. The language is a
> bit
> hard to get into, maybe because of the lack of free information except for
> countless ring benchmarks in blog posts. This is why I've spent hours
> adding
> examples to rosettacode.org and it's why I'm writing Learn You Some
> Erlang.
> This is why other people are writing books/guides like Luke Venediger's
> Erlang for Skeptics, too. Some users spend a lot of time answering
> questions
> on stackoverflow to help to.
>

I think the problem is rooted much deeper. There is another issue, sometimes
companies are scared to use particular technology or language due to lack of
developers and community behind it, so they might be held hostage by few key
people who know this technology and unable to maintain their product in the
long run. And this is where functional programming languages run quite
short, I think. A lot of people get exposed to programming at school and
universities. However, during last decades there was a significant erosion
of functional programming courses from curricula.

Many universities never ever teach any functional language. Even in MIT
(according to some old article) they switched several courses from Scheme to
Java.

As recent Erlang convert without prior functional programming expertise, I
can only assure that leap from C/Java paradigm to functional is far from
negligible. Perhaps, if youngsters could be taught some functional
programming in school or university, more people would have been more open
towards Erlang.

Just some on-topic reading about Perils of Java in Schools by Joel on
Software: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html

So perhaps, we should invest some of our time teaching Erlang and functional
programming in universities, so we grow crop of Erlang developers.
Regards,
Vasilij Savin