I've heard great things about it, but still haven't got myself to check it out. At a 5 seconds glance, it looked like Haskell.
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Anonymous2007-07-31 9:33 ID:hnO5cX0w
The language is decent, about as good as Prolog or Haskell. However, the libraries are the best I've ever seen for the distributed/high availability domain.
Joe Marshall's PhD. thesis is a good overview, and actually very readable.
Erlang is a general-purpose concurrent programming language and runtime system. The sequential subset of Erlang is a functional language, with strict evaluation, single assignment, and dynamic typing. For concurrency it follows the Actor model.
As far as I can tell, it isn't lazy, which is one of the main reasons why you would use a functional language. Lazy.
>>1 OKAY YOU FUQIN ANGERED AN EXPERT PROGRAMMER
GODFUCKIGNDAMN
FIRST OF ALL, YOU DONT FUQIN KNOW WHAT A MAN PAGE IS
SECONDLY, THIS IS /prog/ DO NOT DEMAND USEFUL ANSWERS THE WAY YOU WANT THEM TO BE
THIRDLY PROGRAMMING IS ALL ABOUT PHILOSOPHY AND ``ABSTRACT BULLSHITE'' THAT YOU WILL NEVER COMPREHEND
AND FUQIN LASTLY, FUCK OFF WITH YOUR BULLSHYT
EVERYTHING HAS ALREADY BEEN ANSWERED IN>>5
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Anonymous2007-07-31 12:43 ID:RmA6QmfZ
As far as I can tell, it isn't lazy, which is one of the main reasons why you would use a functional language
lolwut?
For the dynamic typing problem, there is a static analyzer (Dialyzer) for catching most type errors.
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Anonymous2007-07-31 16:03 ID:8Q/yGUIS
>>14
For reattaching your severed arm, we provide some band-aids.
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Anonymous2007-07-31 16:43 ID:RmA6QmfZ
As if statically-typed languages are any better. They trade off flexibility for an improvement in the lower bound of errors.
I think the more pragmatically inclined have decided a middle road is best. That's still very much a work in progress. Perl6 seems to have started it, and now some academics have decided to run with it and see where it leads.
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Anonymous2007-07-31 18:14 ID:2Rpn1lUB
Anally-typed languages are anal.
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Anonymous2007-07-31 22:05 ID:HQac4eRK
>>12
>I'd like to see OS threads scale.
I thought threading and distributed processing were the main selling points. It was tested with millions of threads; not OS threads, but I don't know what the limits are on the threading mechanism it uses.
Comes from Siemens, which makes telecom switching computers. I've coded for them, and it mostly comes down to a battle between your distributed processes and the network. Your programs want to talk to each other, and the network doesn't want to let them - power outages, incorrect network config files, dumbasses yanking out network and power cables, dumbasses hitting the off switch on the computers without shutting down first, etc.
Erlang has built-in recovery from that kind of interruption in interprocess communication.
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Anonymous2007-07-31 22:11 ID:HQac4eRK
Trivia: "Erlang" is a term from traffic theory, which is a big deal in telephone networks. AT&T spent a LOT of resources making the US telephone network VERY reliable. (When was the last time your land line call was blocked or dropped?) They hired top mathematicians to invent and patent the traffic routing algorithms programmed into the switching computers.
Hmm, my last 2 posts seem contradictory.
The unreliable network in 18 is the computer network, not the telephone network in 19. You'd get shot if you hit the off switch on a telephnoe switching machine without proper shutdown.
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Anonymous2007-07-31 23:20 ID:Sxsnpi0q
wut? "erlang" is the name of a math guy, and the contraction of "ericsson language". it was developed by ericsson.
You'd get shot if you hit the off switch on a telephnoe switching machine without proper shutdown.
Now i want to do that someday just to see what would happen.
>it was developed by ericsson.
Yes. I mixed them up there, sorry. I worked with Ericsson, Siemens, and AT&T hardware. Erlang being a mathematical unit in traffic theory and a common word in telephone equipment making companies before the language is still true, though.