[erlang-questions] What I dislike about Erlang

[Evan Miller]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 12:42 PM, Evan Miller <emmiller@REDACTED> wrote:
> Did anyone else ever play Marble Drop from Maxis in the late 90s? That
> is the kind of interface I would like to see for the Erlang run-time.

For those of you who were not in middle school in 1997, here is a
screenshot of Marble Drop:

http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/168377-marble-drop-windows-screenshot-one-of-the-many-puzzless.jpg

The game was to figure out what order to drop colored balls down into
the different funnels to achieve a desired ordering of balls at the
bottom, but every drop would (predictably) change the internal state
of the level as the marble passed by. I think of the colored balls as
being like Erlang messages, the funnels as being processes that
receive messages from the outside, the gates and switches as being
various bits of internal state, and the trays at the bottom being
assertions about the final state of the application.

I don't believe in "visual programming" per se but with the right
interface I think "visual debugging" would make Erlang programs much
more comprehensible (and fun).

Evan