[erlang-questions] erlang sucks

[KatolaZ]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 09:59:27AM -0700, Kevin Scaldeferri wrote:
>
> Personally, I feel like for the type of tasks that most students /  
> academics do, Haskell is nicer.  For the sort of thing that most  
> professional programmers do, Erlang is nicer.  I can live with some  
> modest extra verbosity in exchange for solving some really hard  
> practical problems.
>

To be honest, I don't think that the matter is "the type of tasks that
most students / academics do" :-) I think that Erlang has some nice
stuff that haskell still misses (like native support for reliability
management, for instance); but anybody who knows a bit of haskell
cannot deny that its syntax is much more clear and expressive, and
this does not have anything to do with the fact that you are an
experienced firm programmer or an undergraduate student: it is just a
matter of fact :-)

I usually hear Erlang programmers complaining about Lisp parentheses,
but if you look into an Erlang module which does something meaningful,
you would find tons of parentheses, and of 4 different types: "()",
"[]", "{}", "<<>>". 

What I mean is that we need to use a little of criticism also when we
talk about our favourite language, and in this sense I really
appreciated that blogpost which started this kind of flame: if we read
it from a "neutral" point of view, we'll find that most of what ketz
have written is TRUE, expecially if we use another FPL like haskell
for the comparison. 

Finally, I agree with Ulf when he says that Erlang, Haskell,
lisp/scheme and ML/OCaml communities should work together much more
than how they are actually doing: all of them could benefit from such
kind of collaboration. Maybe Erlang would have been a better language
today from many perspectives, if our community had got ideas and
solutions from haskell/OCaml/scheme experiences.

My2Cents

Enzo

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[ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ]
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