[erlang-questions] Inferno - erroneous comments

[Charles Forsyth]

>I'm not sure what the most glaring misunderstanding
>is - whether it is the alledged lack of a royalty-free 
>distribution or the supposed lack of a VM.   (:

quite.

i'm not really sure where that table came from.  the overview
or at least the table must be many years old, since it bothers to mention CORBA
which i haven't come across for ages. (although looking at the erlang archives for this item,
i saw CORBA mentioned on this list recently: it's a proper little zombie, isn't it!).
still, i'd have thought i'd have been asked to check the content,
but that seems unlikely given what it has says about Erlang,
because i knew much more about it than that table shows (incorrectly).

i'd looked at Erlang quite early on, and having
checked my mailbox here (at my home address) just now i see in 1997 a fairly
terse e-mail saying i couldn't have the source to the emulator
for the university distribution of Free(!) Erlang so i could port it to Plan 9:
	``at this moment I see no reason for us to add another platform''
(but i was offering to do the work!).  happily i also find a message from
December 1998 announcing Open Source Erlang: with results we see today.
(sadly by that time i'd got myself too involved in starting a company
and with no time to do the port.  i'm sure there's a lesson there.)

anyway, now that it has been pointed out to me, i'll see if
i can find the source to the offending document and simply delete the
table.  quite apart from wronging Erlang,
i think tickbox charts and feature lists are a terrible way
to compare software systems.

>At least, Erlang gets one tick more than XML/SOAP...

i myself get quite ticked off about XML/SOAP.

it's a little startling that this has suddenly surfaced now, however, after all these years,
because just a few weeks ago i happened to spot Yariv Sadan's Erlang projects
on googlecode, which led me to his blog, which led me to some other interesting things,
which got me thinking.  (and not before time, friends and colleagues might say.)

sorry for the fuss.

Charles Forsyth
Vita Nuova