[erlang-questions] The Beauty of Erlang Syntax

[Kevin Scaldeferri]

On Feb 24, 2009, at 1:54 PM, Christian wrote:

> In a way, the research that lead to Erlang was about finding a way to
> making it faster to have low-skilled developers cranking out new
> features. It certainly wouldnt be good PR if Erlang was a language for
> highly-skilled developers to slowly cranking out old features.
>


I wasn't in the industry at the time, but I'm not sure that the  
programming workforce of the 80's closely resembled the workforce of  
today (or the past decade).

But, really, one should ask, if Erlang was designed / evolved /  
selected with this goal, why is it that 20 years later most developers  
have never even heard of it?  I guess one possibility would be to  
blame Ericsson and credit MS and Sun for why C# and Java are the  
languages of choice for companies who care more about how easy it is  
to hire an army of developers than anything else.  There could be  
other possible explanations, though.

Also, you've exaggerated & distorted my point with your last  
sentence.  Haskell unabashedly markets itself as a language for highly  
skilled developers to quickly and reliably implement new features.  It  
is still unpopular.  Most companies do not like the idea of using a  
language that requires them to find a top 10% or top 1% developer to  
work on their project.

Of course, you might also have misinterpreted my comment entirely.   
I'm certainly not promoting this point of view, but just saying that  
to a lot of companies "practical for the real world" means "I can  
easily hire someone".


-kevin


>> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 18:14, Kevin Scaldeferri <kevin@REDACTED 
>> > wrote:
>> It's kinda funny how often people think of things like reliability,
>> high-availability, etc. as "academic" concerns.  An awful lot of
>> companies care primarily about how fast low-skilled developers can
>> crank out new features.
>>
>> -kevin

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