erlang-vs-scala

[Robert Fraser]

Charles Hixson wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Jun 2008 12:26:43 -0300, Juan Jose Comellas wrote:
> 
>> ...
>> renoX wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> ...
>>>
>>> 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.. 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
> 
> Isn't Erlang extremely slow, though?  The comparisons I seen all place it 
> several times slower than, say, Ruby at the same task.  (Granted the 
> tasks were chosen to compare languages that are largely single stream of 
> execution.  I'm thinking of places like 
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/)

For multithrreaded tasks it does much better, but not as well as 
multithreaded code written in a native language. When you're developing, 
say, for a supercomputer where a fifty clock cycle difference in an 
inner loop/frequently called function can man 3 more days of execution 
time when the program is used in production, these things tend to matter 
a lot more.