Language Bindings for Erlang Again (Opinion)

Yariv Sadan yarivvv@REDACTED
Thu Jun 8 15:10:47 CEST 2006


> The complete rearrangement to functional programming and message passing
>   does not come easily for 99% of software developers.  Now, we can
> argue whether you should hire people like that, but if you ignore 99% of
> all developers, your language is unlikely to become very widespread.
>

Learning Erlang is far easier than learning C/C++/Java. Erlang
processes and message passing are *far* easier to grasp than threads,
threadpools, mutexes, forks, barriers, locks, producer/consumer
chains, etc. Erlang tuples and functions are *far* easier to
understand than convoluted C++ inhertience rules, virtual functions,
memory management, pointers, auto-pointers, references, templates,
template metaprogramming (yes, C++ templates are a functional code
generation language) etc. Erlang data structures are much easier to
use than STL equivalents.
Who are those developers for whom Erlang is so hard to grasp? Is the
world truly dominated only by VBScript and PHP developers?

> OTP cannot be picked up in 4 to 8 weeks because its documentation sucks.
>

The documentation is actually very good. I agree that user comments
are lacking, but Joe is working on that. An official Erlang wiki would
be very helpful as well for people who aren't comfortable with mailing
lists.

Cheers
Yariv



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