(Prolog + LISP + Erlang) with integration issues versus C++

[Mickaël Rémond]

Hello,

Le 4 sept. 05 à 11:35, Dev Functional a écrit :
> 3)  It was pointed out that today even Ericcsson does not use  
> Erlang for its
>      new product development. Why ?

Ulf already answers on this one and this seems to be a wrong  
statement, now.

> 7)  RPC and message passing related weakness in Erlang can cause  
> security
>      vulnerability issues.

? This is a very surprising statement ? Do you know why they are  
saying that ?

> 8)  High performance in computation, high responsiveness in network  
> i/o,
>      aync and disk i/o is mandatory.
>
>      The performance slide related to yaws was mentioned and the  
> management
>      wondered why the world hasn't moved on to yaws by ditching
> oh-so-slow Apache ?

Why would they do so if they have a solution that satisfy their  
needs ? This is the same with all legacy technology. Some enterprise  
still run Cobol applications. They do not rewrite it in another  
technology because it cost money.
The decision is different for new project however and we are using  
Yaws for our new web development projects.
This is always the kind of argument stated to refuse to consider new  
technologies. Most of the time, there is nothing to do about it, as  
it depends on the company culture and strategy. Some companies are  
early adopters and use technology as a way to make better product in  
a way that make them very different from their competitors. Other are  
only using established/legagy technology because they do not feel  
this a key element and are more afraid of failure than attracted by  
success. This is often a management decision and you cannot argue  
with technical arguments as this is seen as a strategic matter.

>        It was also pointed out that Google does lot of work related to
> information
>        retrieval, inference, distributed computing over thousands of
> compute nodes
>        but does not use Erlang ! Why ?

Same reasons probably here.
I would add that some company are using Erlang but do not tell it. I  
know a very very big dotcom company (not Google) that is using Erlang  
but insists no keeping this secret.

> 11)  The management also highlighted that if the languages so far used
> (prolog,lisp,erlang)
>        were so great then the capitalists would have grabbed them up
> long time ago
>        and made lots of money by now by developing and selling  
> products.
>        So, either the capitalists are fools or the current  
> development team !

They have. Both Lisp and Erlang are interesting as this is two  
languages that have been use to built success-story company (Viaweb  
for Lisp and Bluetail for Erlang). Other companies are using Erlang  
as a strategic technology.
To understand how good a different technology can be for a company  
you should read Paul Graham's essays (For example, "The other road  
ahead", http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html, or "Beating the  
average", http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

> In the final analysis, the project will proceed with the above made  
> decisions
> and I will need to abide by these decisions if I am to keep my job.

Yes. As Joe Armstrong often explains it, the best way to introduce  
Erlang is to offer an alternative on a failing project (See for  
example Lessons learnt: http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Armstrong/ 
bits.ps)

Anyway, good luck with your future projects,

-- 
Mickaël Rémond