Comments on: Next language

By: elise

elise — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:27:28 +0000

I see from your blog that you’re a fan ! Thanks for the advice, i’ll pick up those resources.

By: Alain O'Dea

Alain O'Dea — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:03:34 +0000

I can tell you from personal experience that Erlang delivers real productivity and ease of use for the developer. I have found it very useful for desktop automation and data analysis. To me, pattern-matching and tail recursion are what make the language so easy to read and write. I have found that I can easily understand how 3rd-party libraries work by reading through their source code. Erlang By Example screencasts with Kevin Smith and Joe Armstrong's Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World are great resources for learning Erlang. I highly recommend picking them up.

By: elise

elise — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:37:10 +0000

and you’re right, concurrency can be mindbogglingly complex.

I’ll read that Little book of semaphores thanks for the reference.

By: elise

elise — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:34:56 +0000

Well, with distributed architectures and multi-multi processors there is more of a call for such a language.

It’s like Joe Armstrong said: a language comes up when there’s an application for it. Ruby has the same age as Java but wasn’t much heard of before 2002-3 …

By: Philip Paeps

Philip Paeps — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:30:23 +0000

(why did that single sentence go through?)

Concurrency is hard. Concurrency is very central to Erlang. This is probably part of the reason. Many programmers do not understand concurrency.

I don’t feel Erlang removes The Little Book of Semaphores from the required reading list though.

By: Philip Paeps

Philip Paeps — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:27:20 +0000

Funny how it took 20 years for the language to become “hype”?