[erlang-questions] node.js vs erlang

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 21/06/2014, at 2:47 AM, Leonard Boyce wrote:
> They are using Sublime as that's their editor of choice.
> When I started learning Erlang I was informed that the 'defacto'
> standard for indentation is the indentation used by elang mode for
> emacs as this was the primary erlang editor. Maybe I was misinformed,
> but that became our coding standard. Others developers use emacs or
> ElrIDE (which uses the same indentation as emacs). No other 'popular'
> editor correctly supports the 'emacs style' indentation for Erlang.
> Maybe it's just me but I like consistency and my mind is 'trained' to
> match this indentation format.

So?  The only time I let a text editor control my indentation
is when slamming a drawer shut on my fingers just isn't enough.
(*Help* my indentation, yes.  *Control* it, no way.)
You can get any indentation you want in any text editor you want.

> Again, they're learning and it's a process. In our main project we use
> the "ux" library.
> But I understand their befuddlement. It just "seems" like something a
> language should include.

Hmm.  Unicode is *appallingly* complex, and good library support
for it is really important.  There aren't actually a lot of
languages that do a good job of it, it is *very* far from being
something you can routinely assume for any programming language.
In an ideal would, we *would* be able to, but in the real world,
we can't *yet* take it for granted.

> Seeing the movement over the versions with unicode support I guess
> that eventually it may exist.

Speaking as someone who has been trying to build reasonable support
for another programming language, I think it's fair to say that
Erlang is moving Unicodewards about as fast as we have any right
to expect.  The only thing that will change this is someone with
deep pockets caring enough to fund more work than you would ever
have imagined necessary.