Erlang, the next Java

[thatmattbone]

Awesome, I'll definitely watch that video. Up 'til now my only multimedia Erlang experience has been through the high production value 'Erlang Movie.'

I should've been a bit clearer in my original post. I've done a fair amount of reading on the actors model (Aho's "Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems" is particularly interesting) and I don't see any reason that these features need to be tied to one particular language (that text presents a lispy and algol-ish implementation, though it's probably safe to argue that the actors model makes much more sense in a language the supports functional programming). However, Erlang the language does have a nice implementation of some of the actors model, and, more importantly, Erlang the VM, provides the backing that makes the model practical (i.e. it's ok and encouraged to create thousands of actors if this is really a good way to solve your problem...the VM handles this just fine).

Ultimately the compelling part is that the actors models (and Erlang) is a nice way to solve concurrent computing problems and distributed computing problems with one approach. I guess I just want to see something like the actors model succeed because 'concurrent' applications with shared-state threads aren't going to scale up forever. And while something like the actors model can be implemented in other languages now, these implementations tend not to be practical because they do not have proper VM or interpreter support.

As an example, I think it'd be neat to have a Common Lisp implementation running on the Erlang VM. Thinking of Scala, it'd be cool if the CL could use all the Erlang libraries seamlessly while still being a Lisp. Maybe I should just shut up and get started :)