[erlang-questions] If you are homesick for object.selector

[David Goehrig]

-=-=- dave@REDACTED -=-=-

On Jan 25, 2013, at 9:41 PM, ok@REDACTED wrote:
> It's all just pure values and functions underneath.
> Would _this_ satisfy the complaints?

Well I don't actually have a complaint, although that sugar looks sugary :)

I do, however, see a fundamental design flaw in any Erlang program that attempts to manipulate nested data structures as it were C (or substitute your favorite Algol in Funny Hats here). 

Erlang has a wonderful dictionary object for each process, and you can straight forwardly map any Algol in funny hats language solution to Erlang message sends + process dictionaries. You just have to observe strict message passing OO requirements, as process dictionaries can not be modified externally (without playing games at the VM level).

In my experience 100k+ processes acting as basically Python dictionaries or Perl hashes is just as manageable as 100k+ objects in any OO language. Only in Erlang, I can't cheat and those 100k processes are much easier to wrangle over a distributed cluster. 

Dave