[erlang-questions] erlang sucks

[Alpár Jüttner]

For the heaven's sake, I have never said it is a disadvantage of Erlang
that is functional !!!! I only said that it might cause some
difficulties for a beginner (a student), because most of them are
already familiar with a procedural language, and they want to write
program in Erlang in the same way as they did in C/C++/Java/Python.

Is my English so bad?

Regars,
Alpar



On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 11:11 -0500, Rick Pettit wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 11:41:10AM +0000, Alp?r J?ttner wrote:
> > > Maybe it is due to the fact that most of them know C/C++/Java/Python.
> > > Maybe Erlang syntax is not so intuitive and easy as one could expect
> > > from a modern and powerful languages.  
> > > Maybe because the standard library is not so rich and not so
> > > consistent as expected from a mature language.
> > 
> > I cannot agree with it. I grew up in the C/C++ world and also had known
> > Python before I met Erlang, still I find it very intuitive. I'm also
> > _very_ impressed by the simplicity and the expressive power. (I'm not a
> > student though...)
> > 
> > I think, the major obstacle for newcomers is not the syntax, but the
> > immutable data structures, the impossibility of variable rebinding, and
> 
> These "features" make it much easier to write buggy code (and much harder to
> find such buggy code). The developers you speak of need to take off their
> blinders if they ever hope to see the light.
> 
> > the miss of loop constructs like 'for' and 'while'.
> 
> Erlang has plenty of loop constructs--how else could you write a server
> loop? And with the use of tail-recursion this need not be inefficient.
> 
> There's also lists:foldl/3, lists:foreach/2, list comprehensions, etc. I
> much, much prefer the look of these constructs over the equivalent 
> for or while loops--regardless, the same can be accomplished with both.
> 
> > For someone familiar
> > (only) with procedural languages, it is hard to believe that a language
> > can be efficient without these features.
> 
> For someone more familiar with functional languages, it is hard to believe
> applications can be written correctly (let alone efficiently) _with_ those
> features.
> 
> -Rick