I’m thinking now – well, suppose there were a “strings” library… under what circumstances would I ever need to code an application in anything else? What’s more, apart from interfacing to existing legacy databases, I can’t really think of any circumstance where I would want to use a traditional RDBMS over Mnesia; And what’s more that that – as Erlyweb develops, I suspect I’ll be asking “why use any other web framework?” too (I’m definitely wondering why Yariv chose to use MySQL).

All in all – the syntax issues raised seem truly trivial in comparison with the ROI – so here’s my “challenge”: Code a non-trivial application in Erlang *of your own design*, then come back and tell us all how much, or if, you care about syntactic sugar.

And why the hell lists of integers (which bloat as mentioned on 64 bit archs) when array of bytes could very easily have been used (modulo unicode)?

Yah, on second thought I was being a bit excessive in saying I don’t want to ever learn it. It really does seem interesting and no other language offers some of Erlang’s nicities so maybe I’ll look into learning it when I have some time. I still don’t think your defenses fly but that doesn’t mean the good features aren’t worth the annoyances…and hopefully someone will come along and take the good bits and jettison the bad.

@Sam O:

Ohh and where did I make an incorrect claim about functional languages?

The point about immutability is simply that having mutable variables gives you forms of programming that aren’t available only having immutable data (this isn’t a point about theoretical computability). Thus to compare apples to apples you must compare the readability of the code to do something as would be implemented in a language with mutable data and in a language without mutable data. You can’t just assume that it’s going to be the same code in both sorts of languages and then say viola the immutable language is easier to read.

What languages are easier to read or understand is ultimately a psychological matter that has to be decided by empirical examination. Theory can’t really tell you this.

Regarding code organization, I’d like to paraphrase Yariv and pose a challenge: write a large application in Erlang and and show me how code organization was a problem for you.

This is half-kidding, of course, but only half. Personally, I’ve experienced large-scale Erlang development through all life cycles of a huge software system (> 2 million lines of code, > 100 OTP applications, hundreds of mnesia tables) for more than a decade, and I can honestly say that not only did Erlang not cause us any great problems in this area – we’ve found it very helpful. The issue that needed to be addressed from the start was deciding on a namespace convention, but that is trivial in a closed system. In an open collaboration environment, namespace can become an issue, but so far, the Erlang community seems to be coping with that as well.

Dismissing Erlang until you need robust concurrency misses the point of using share-nothing concurrency as a very attractive structuring concept in its own right. You will miss Erlang’s wonderful support for encapsulation and modularity as long as you don’t embrace the notion of modeling with concurrency. This support pays of big-time in large software systems.

Having said this, I respect that people have different requirements on a programming language. While working with large software systems, things like whether or not the ‘if’ syntax is pretty is truly insignificant, if the language helps you with modularity, code reuse, debugging, etc. But of course, Erlang was designed to solve exactly the sort of problems that are among the most common killers of telecoms software development projects. For other tasks, e.g. ones where it’s all about fast and convenient string processing, Erlang may not be your first choice.

This doesn’t mean that it isn’t a general-purpose language. General purpose doesn’t mean “ideal for everything”. From my point of view, both Java and C suck at concurrency, but I will concede that both are general-purpose languages – even reasonably good ones, as long as one learns how to use them properly.

strings being lists of integers is unnatural.
no other language that i know of does this

no debugger
:(

@calvin look at the regexp module.

@Franz I’ve actually done a good amount of C programming :) Immutability allows you to pass values by reference while also guaranteeing that data never changes. It’s like declaring all your variables ‘final’ in Java.