erlang-vs-scala

[Sean Kelly]

== Quote from renoX (renosky at free.fr)'s article
> janderson a écrit :
> > A friend at work pointed out this article to me:
> >
> > http://yarivsblog.com/articles/2008/05/18/erlang-vs-scala/
> >
> > -Joel
> Very interesting, thanks.
> Ssome advantage of Erlang are mostly theoretical in my book: 'hot code
> swapping' bah, if you want to have full availability you need redundant
> hardware and you can use this for software version change (though it's
> not trivial I agree).

This isn't always feasible.  Consider a phone switch (the purpose for
which Erlang was created in the first place).  In such instances, even if
the programmer has the money and the space for duplicate hardware
(unlikely, if you've ever seen a phone switch) then they would still have
to reroute all new calls to the backup box and then wait an indefinite
period for all existing calls to complete before cycling the old box.  As
someone who has actually done this, I can tell you that I'd have much
preferred simply having new calls simply be able to use the new software.

> If you don't need full availability you just stop your software for
> version change: it's much more simple this way.
> Also, I disagree about the 'ease' of learning Erlang: Erlang has an
> alien syntax (which I don't like much) and an alien way of doing things
> (single assignment) which is not so easy for developers..

I disagree.  The Erlang syntax is really pretty straightforward.  In fact,
the Erlang book covers the entire language in about the first two
chapters, and leaves the rest for discussing concepts like concurrency.
I felt that this was more than enough coverage for the language itself,
and was able to get going with Erlang in the short time it took me to
read these first few chapters.  There are some things that most users
won't need to know anyway, like bit packing and dealing with binary
blobs.

> IMHO developers learn Erlang because it's good at distributed
> programming not because of the language itself whereas Scala has a
> really nice syntax (better than D's), but it's not as good as
> distributed programming some criticism in the article where interesting
> (cooperative scheduling)..
> renoX

Fair enough.  I was drawn to D for its syntax rather than what it did as
well, so I can see how someone might be drawn to Scala for the same
reason.


Sean