The Next Mainstream Programming Language: A Game Developer's Perspective :: Redux

[Brad Anderson]

Craig Black wrote:
> 
> "Sean Kelly" <sean at f4.ca> wrote in message
> news:f7e2lu$1rrg$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> Brad Anderson wrote:
>>> Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>>>> I read in a recent article (I think it came from Slashdot, but not
>>>> sure)
>>>> that a new programming paradigm is needed to make concurrency easier,
>>>> just in the same way as OO (and class encapsulation) improved on the
>>>> previous data abstraction paradigm to make code cleaner and easier to
>>>> write. Just in the same way as structured programming (ie, using
>>>> functions/scopes/modules) improved on the previous paradigm of
>>>> sequential/global/goto-using code, so to speak.
>>>
>>> http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/articles/erlang.html
>>>
>>> search for "Concurrency Oriented Programming"
>>
>> Thanks for the link Brad, this is a great article.  I've never really
>> looked into erlang, but it sounds like it's the type of language I've
>> been thinking we'll end up with (based on message-passing, but a bit
>> evolved from that).  I'm still not convinced that a functional
>> language is required for this, but it is certainly a more natural
>> fit.  Seems like the greatest obstacle for erlang would be getting
>> schools to teach functional programming again--it's a bit of a chicken
>> & egg problem.
>>
>>
>> Sean
> 
> Interesting.  I wonder how Erlang scalability and performance compares
> to other functional languages.

Um, I think it's something like "stupid-good" or other such technical
term.  Other than Termite Scheme, I believe it's the only one with such
lightweight processes, to the point where you can spawn near a million
on one box w/o bogging down.  Some CL dialects have green threads, which
are lighter-weight than OS ones, but I'm not sure there's a comparison
to Erlang's.  Termite was admittedly not as robust on the distributed
side of things, which helps scalability considerably.  However, in
subsequent releases they have gotten better.

I got the sense (although I'm not sure yet) that Paul Graham's Arc
language hasn't given concurrency as much consideration as I think it
needs.  Hopefully that will change...

I would really enjoy a language that had the Lisp look & feel, but with
all the concurrency primitives, distributed nature, and fault tolerance
of Erlang.  Oh, and the pattern matching a la Prolog.  I don't think I'm
asking for much ;)

BA