Erlang hints from an CO junkie

Eric Merritt cyberlync@REDACTED
Wed Aug 11 18:31:34 CEST 2004


On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 19:33:10 +0400, Vlad Balin <vlad@REDACTED> wrote:
> >    Erlang uses  a simple functional language  inside the BBs  - this is
> > not particularly interesting - *any*  language that does the job would
> > do - the important bit is the concurrency.
> 
> Not only the functional language, but very _slow_ functional language,
> with boxed computations and dynamic typing. Also, it should be unsafe
> since it's not easy to check types at compile stage.
> 
> If language is _really_ irrelevant, why should you recommend anyone to use
> slow and unsafe Erlang? This simple functional language has a number
> of obvious disadvantages. Why not Smalltalk, for example? :))

 Lets not  get into the static vs dynamic typing argument.  One  of
the reason's I like erlang  is  its dynamic typing. As for the
slowness, are you sure that the slowness is inherent in the erlang
functional langauge area? It could just  as easily  be a side effect
of concurrency (at least in the beam vm).

 Erlang has its warts, but dynamic typing and a functional bent are
not among them.
> 
> 


-- 
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc,
informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Lisp



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