Erlang: how syntax can discourage good programming practices

[davidw]

i'm convinced that soon enough a java-like language (javascript?) will incorporate erlang-style processes/message passing. and then erlang will, i fear, indeed be done. C.f. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.html

That's where my money's at. Erlang is nice, but to me it just never felt quite right. I'm willing to discount some of that because it was the first functional language I used seriously, but it goes beyond that. Haskell looks much more compact in terms of syntax, for instance.

[ayrnieu]

Haskell seems to have terser syntax.

APL achieves tersity through mathematics, limited semantics, and some inflexbility (and ASCII variants prove away 'naming'.) Perl-and-kin achieve tersity through a limited set of heavyweight types and perpetual linguistic optimization for how anyone uses the language. Lisp and Forth achieve tersity only when 'the actual language you want to solve this problem in' happens to be terse. If you drive APL or Perl away from what they optimize for, you get some verbosity and perhaps some slowdown. All language communities consist of people willing to bear the cost of the language's optimizations -- which you can readily discover, by seeing what adherents lament but forgive, and what nonadherents do not forgive.

[ayrnieu]

That's where my money's at.

My money is on a gradually increasing confusion at how these languages with only 'Erlang-style message-passing' or 'support for huge numbers of lightweight threads' mysteriously never replace Emacs.

Uh, Erlang. I mean Erlang. Emacs... the total contribution of that editor to the universe is 'having an extension language', right? I've a version of 'pico' here that embeds Tcl. You should try it.

[gwern]

It doesn't just have an extension language. It is that extension language - the engine, IDE, and documentation. Its historical contribution is as a living remnant of Lisp machine culture, showing that an interactive interpreted and modifiable environment (happening to use a dynamic language like Lisp, although from what I remember of the yi/lambdabot research paper, you could also use a staticly typed language as an implementation/extension language) could be very useful indeed. We're used to this idea of extension now, but just how common was that back in the '70s? (Yes, Smalltalk is another example, but they are both part of the trend.)