5 second Erlang Submission

[Richard Carlsson]

Michael Williams wrote:
> Lisp: Language desigers

Hackers at MIT, rather. It started as a blackboard notation,
and then someone actually wrote an interpreter for it.
The rest of the development was pure hacker pragmaticism.
This was in 1958, when "language designer" was an unknown
concept - Fortran was invented around 1954. (Well, I suppose
that Backus could be considered the Original Language
Designer - the CS equivalent of Original Sin...)

> C: Product designers

Well, operating system designers, who got tired of rewriting
a lot of assembler code each time they wanted to port the
Space Travel game to new hardware.

> C++: Religious object orientation

I really don't think C++ was ever about religion. It was always
about getting the power of abstraction found in Simula, while
retaining the speed, portability, and down-to-the-hardware
features of C, and never making the program slower than C
because of language features that you don't actually use.
The consequence of this (extremely pragmatic) philosophy was
that C++ got an enormous amount of users (and that the C we
know today is not the C of 1978, when Stroustrup began working
on "C with classes"). However, the road to hell is paved with
good intentions...

	/Richard