[erlang-questions] Where's Dijkstra when we need him?

[Richard O'Keefe]

One of our former students gave a talk here this afternoon.
He's been working in industry, and has a very interesting
perspective on what programming is all about.  It's all about
building Web and Mobile applications in Java, and as well all
know (:-) _every_ nontrivial program has to have a data base.
His demonstration of IntellIJ, Spring Roo, and a bunch of
other things convinced me that Erlang is a WONDERFUL language.
I've long had a secret fear that maybe Erlang might after all
not really be efficient enough, but seeing the equivalent of

-record(note, {latitude :: float(), longitude :: float(), model :: string()}).

and a few lines of code to set up a dets or mnesia table and then
maybe tv:start() turn into at least dozens of files was, well,
scary (you mean there are people who think this is a *good* thing?)
and encouraging (how could Erlang-based systems *possibly* do worse?).
People in the Java-for-Web world seem to be happy piling layer upon layer
of semi-transparent goo over Java.