[erlang-questions] The Beauty of Erlang Syntax

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 26 Feb 2009, at 1:39 am, Joe Armstrong wrote:
> C++ spread as if in a vacuum - there were no competing FPLs at the
> time (Lisp possibly - but
> this needed an expensive lisp machine).

Lisp worked fine on VAXes and IBM mainframes.
ML worked fine on VAXes too.
Pop-11 was pretty good and ran on several
machines including VAXes.

One problem they had was dialects.
Common Lisp was still firming up and many other Lisp
dialects were still in use.  Several other dialects of
Pop were also in use; I must admit that I never really
took to Pop-11 because it was different enough from
WPop to make porting unpalatable.

Simula, however had been around for nearly 20 years
when C++ came along.  When C++ was invented,
Simula was *already* a better C++.
But Simula had a garbage collector, and C++ didn't.

It would be interesting to know why Objective C wasn't
taken up.  (Except by NeXT and now Apple.)
>

> Eventually we will have to fight out market share between
> Erlang/Haskell/O'caml/F#
> but today we stand to loose by this.

I hear that Java is going to get closures.
_Eventually_ Java will *be* a functional programming language
with a lot of histerical raisons baggage, and someone will
introduce a better simpler Java...