[erlang-questions] Chicago Erlang Conference --- a dabbler's take

[Daniel Goertzen]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 1:37 PM, Garrett Smith <g@REDACTED> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 12:00 PM, Lloyd R. Prentice
> <lloyd@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> <snip>


> > - And, finally, during waning minutes of the party, Garrett Smith told
> me that Erlang should be completely rewritten from the ground up. He's
> tried with e2, but there's no interest.
>
> You forgot to mention that Garrett was stammering drunk and shouting
> for Vinoski, saying he wanted to "teach that dirty scheduler writing
> scoundrel a lesson he'd not soon forget!"
>
> But to clarify, I did not say that Erlang should be rewritten, but
> that some other new distribution, built atop the Erlang VM and
> toolchain (similar to what Elixir has done), could be created that
> cleaned up the core libraries and was free from legacy restrictions.
>
> I personally like Erlang as it is -- I don't want a new language (like
> Elixir). But I recognize that the legacy of Erlang prevents it from
> moving aggressively into a more newbie friendly and accessible form.
> That's a matter of physics, not politics, religion, or personal taste.
> Erlang will continue to improve incrementally, but it will never enjoy
> the freedom to build-from-scratch that Elixir has. But something new
> *could*.
>
> The problem, obviously I think, is the breathtaking cost of "rewriting
> Erlang". This is a vision that is not likely possible. But one can
> drink and ponder.
>
> I have proposed a new language called Lamprey:
>
> https://github.com/gar1t/lamprey
>
> This doesn't exist. It's mostly a joke and I don't even know if it's
> possible. But if it came to be, it would be epic in the history of
> languages.
>
> The idea is to take the stunning and amazing work of the Elixir
> community and bring it back to Erlang syntax as a new language --
> Lamprey. Lamprey would enjoy clean libraries, documentation, tools,
> etc. without doing any work. When a new version of Elixir is released,
> Lamprey would just run its bash scripts to convert everything back to
> Erlang, and whamo - a new release of Lamprey!
>
> Parasitism at the computer language level.
>
> Robert Virding btw gets credit for the name :)
>
> Thanks Lloyd for attending on Monday. It was a pleasure to finally meet
> you!
>
> Garrett
>


Funny you should mention all that; I've been thinking about something
similar lately.  Port Elixir back to Erlang syntax  so that it can compile
.erl files but bring along interesting Elixir features (interesting to me
is metaprogramming, pipe operator, module system.)  I named it "Still".
It's "still" just erlang with alchemical homage to elixir.

I was also at the conference; thank you for all the hard work that went
into this fantastic event!
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