[erlang-questions] Funargs: Ruby-like blocks for Erlang

Richard O'Keefe ok@REDACTED
Fri Jul 22 07:37:56 CEST 2011


On 22/07/2011, at 4:38 PM, Tony Arcieri wrote:

> 
> LOL okay dude. Are you happy with the rejection of your records proposals?

No.  Any more than I imagine Joe Armstrong is happy that his proposal
for pretty much the same thing has come to nothing.  Actually, there is
no *rejection*.  It's just that nobody has got around to deciding
anything either way yet.

For Erlang's audience, I think
 - fixing the major system integrity weakness of too many atoms blowing
   Erlang out of the water
 - a logging system that deals with all the issues recently mentioned
 - line numbers in exception reports
 - better tracing/monitoring tools
are probably more urgent.

There is a qualitative difference between things that are an irritation
when coding and things that can bring your system down or things that
help you fix systems while customers are screaming at you.

I've made one proposal in the "things that can bring your system down"
area, and whatever my tastes in language design, I would *hope* that that
issue would treated as more urgent.  (And I'm quite disappointed that it
has apparently not been treated as very urgent, because it has quite a
warping effect on data structure design.)

If you've got a language nearly to the point of usability on the Erlang
VM, presumably you understand that VM far better than I do.  I never did
manage to get my head around the Beam instruction set, so if you want to
do something extremely helpful, writing the Beam manual that should
always have existed but doesn't would be close to the top of the list.




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