Erlang much? [LWN.net]

Erlang much?

Posted May 1, 2007 22:22 UTC (Tue) by qu1j0t3 (subscriber, #25786)
In reply to: What, again? by ncm
Parent article: The Rise of Functional Languages (Linux Journal)

Very much an engineering driven language... and functional to boot. (As another poster mentioned, it builds the among the most reliable and scalable concurrent systems out there.)

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Erlang much?

Posted May 2, 2007 11:14 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Erlang is indeed functional, but I'm afraid its functional features are more like nuisances than strong points. The fact that you don't have destructive updates leads to variable names like HR0, HR1, etc. to hold the value after an update (at one place I even saw HR7). Of course, all data that would be in objects in Java are stored in processes, mnesia or ets tables where there is destructive update. The dynamic type system leads to lots of type errors during development. Actually I'm pretty surprised that it works, the VM underneath Erlang is really good (huge number of processes can be run, object files can be changed on the fly) - but I think it has not much to do with the language being functional.

Bye,NAR

Erlang much?

Posted May 3, 2007 5:00 UTC (Thu) by jbw (subscriber, #5689) [Link]

In message #232640 NAR wrote:

> Erlang is indeed functional, but I'm afraid its functional features
> are more like nuisances than strong points. The fact that you don't
> have destructive updates leads to variable names like HR0, HR1,
> etc. to hold the value after an update (at one place I even saw
> HR7).

This is actually one of the key strengths of Erlang. All of the run-time upgrading that is done in Erlang crucially depends on the lack of assignments (destructive updates).