[erlang-questions] The Beauty of Erlang Syntax

[Vassilakis, Thanos]

I was on one of the first java based projects for switches at Ericsson
(1996-97), and it was painful. The choice to move to Java were
political. Managers and BAs wanting to be in the main stream and
mediocre "programmers" wanting  to enhance the skill sets. Although 1.1
was available we were using  Oak, 1.0.3. AWt was awful and there were no
inner classes. Our Erlang prototypes were embarrassingly better than the
production code, but management liked the Java label and the slightly
cooler, if not fully functional,  GUIs.
 
Of course most of the projects failed. Development was on sun, but the
production hardware was HP AUX and the JVM ports were terrible. 
 
 
 Thanos
 

________________________________

From: erlang-questions-bounces@REDACTED
[mailto:erlang-questions-bounces@REDACTED] On Behalf Of Thomas
Lindgren
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 5:20 AM
To: erlang-questions
Subject: Re: [erlang-questions] The Beauty of Erlang Syntax



(Don't know why Yahoo insists on mangling replies, but here we go.)

Basically, at the end of the 90s, Ericsson chose to go with Java+UML and
banned(!) new project starts in Erlang. Politically speaking, the mobile
systems part of the company got to decide.

On the bright side, prior to this, Erlang was closed-source.

Best,
Thomas

________________________________



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.



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