erlang-vs-scala

[Sean Kelly]

== Quote from renoX (renosky at free.fr)'s article
> Sean Kelly a écrit :
> > == Quote from renoX (renosky at free.fr)'s article
> [cut]
> >> 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.
> Sure, but straightforward isn't the same as easy to learn: you cannot
> make a syntax more straightforward than Lisp's syntax but this doesn't
> make the language easy nor pleasant to learn..

Fair enough.

> Why? Because it's different from what we're used to.
> And what about the single assignment?
> Personally I'm not fond of functional programming only.

I agree that it's important for mutability to be available if
necessary.  But Erlang integrates reasonably well with C,
so I don't consider this an issue really.  In fact, I prefer this
approach to the "all in one" approach that D 2.0 seems to
be aiming for, as I prefer that there be a semantic separation
between my functional and imperative code.  I feel that this
is a good way of preventing "bleed through" of concepts
that would complicate and confuse code.  It also neatly
avoids a motivator for producing monolithic code, and
the consequent risk that the mutable-state portion may
fail and corrupt the entire process.

But this is really a matter of preference.  I'm sure many
people disagree, and others simply don't work on the
type of applications Erlang was designed to target.  I
just happen to be in the niche that Erlang was specifically
intended for.  I only wish I'd heard about it 15 years ago
instead of spending all that time mucking about with C++.


Sean