[erlang-questions] Erlang web servers challenge

[Ulf Wiger]

On 11 Jul 2011, at 02:13, Richard O'Keefe wrote:

> What I *got* was students telling me they couldn't read code on
> paper; they needed syntax-colouring IDEs (the listings all fitted
> on a single sheet of paper and used black-and-white styling) and
> ideally a debugger so they could find mistakes by stepping through
> the code.  I also got students telling me that it was horribly
> unreasonable of me to expect them to read a 30-page manual; NOBODY
> could read that much.  And finding a definition of an identifier
> in a 2-page listing is just beyond human capacity; it's impossible
> to do that without the machine assistance of an IDE.


I'm reminded of a lecture in Programming Parallel Systems (by Jens Riboe) at KTH, where a student stopped him after having scribbled a code example on the blackboard:

- What's that?
- ???
- That code you just wrote - what language is it?
- That? It's just pseudo-code
- Well, we only know Pascal!
- Pseudo-code is not an actual language, it's just a sketch of a program.
- But we haven't been taught pseudo-code; we know only Pascal.
- But you can't express this neatly in Pascal…
- That's the only language we've been taught.

Thanks for sharing your experience. :)

BR,
Ulf W

Ulf Wiger, CTO, Erlang Solutions, Ltd.
http://erlang-solutions.com