[erlang-questions] The Beauty of Erlang Syntax

[Peter C. Chapin]

Rapsey wrote:

> For my company, I can say we use a custom built streaming server
> written in Erlang...

I'll throw my $0.02 here.

I teach at Vermont Technical College. We teach the students the usual
assortment of languages... meaning C, C++, Java, Python, some C#. The
software engineering students start with Java, the computer engineering
students start with C. We teach these languages, in part, because our
industry advisory board (and other sources) tells us that these are the
languages they are using and, furthermore, they would like to hire
graduates that are already familiar with them. Also there is a massive
amount of support for such languages in terms of educational materials,
libraries, and tools. Students know this too. They resist learning
languages they perceive as useless on their resume.

I'm a bit of an oddball, personally (as you might guess by the fact that
I'm here). I teach a programming languages course, and I'm planning next
year to use Erlang as the "centerpiece" language for the course.
Naturally one can't cover all the necessary concepts in such a course
using a single language, but I would like the students to leave my
course feeling like they understand at least the basics of functional
programming in general and Erlang specifically. Note that I seriously
considered using F# instead since Microsoft supports F# in Visual
Studio... giving the language a certain legitimacy in the eyes of my
already jaded students.

Anyway, enough rambling for now... I just wanted to put in a word from
the world of academia.

Peter