Resistance to Erlang

[Rick Pettit]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2005 at 10:16:50PM +0200, Dominic Williams wrote:
> Suggested change: use Erlang
> 
> Resistance:
> 
> >"Programming in Erlang requires much effort, since you
> >must deal with process calculi."
> 
> Reason:
> 
> Erlang combines functional programming and the pi calculus, 
> each based on mathematics and logic. It's a really 
> interesting academic field, I'd love to work on that sort of 
> thing if I were a professor, but it has no practical 
> applications, especially with teams of ordinary programmers 
> who don't have Ph.D's in mathematics.

Sending a message to a process is a one-liner in Erlang - is that easier than
setting up a socket in C/C++?

Concurrency in C/C++ to many people implies pthreads - is that simpler than
message passing?

The list goes on and on. All the arguments mentioned are hogwash. As I see it
the biggest problem is that nobody has published a book entitled, "Erlang for
Idiots".

Fortunately there are plenty other languages (and idiots guides to them) for
those who insist on resisting Erlang.

-Rick

P.S. Someone should write a book entitled, "Concurrent Programming In
     Non-concurrent Languages For Dummies" - good be a best seller.