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Well, okay, it sounds like I have therefore interpreted the Erlang Challenge correctly: it highlights what Erlang is good at. And that's fine. There's nothing w

Well, okay, it sounds like I have therefore interpreted the Erlang Challenge correctly: it highlights what Erlang is good at. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with ass-kicking special-purpose programming languages, and I look forward to the day when I will actually spend ten minutes learning Erlang and be able to start discussing it instead of just marveling at it from afar. The thing is, the Arc Challenges (I presume there will be others...) are explicitly intended to convince us that Arc is an awesome language for solving general computing problems. (Of course, they're also tools for designing Arc: If Arc proves unconvincingly awesome at any point, the plan is to twiddle its design knobs until the awesomeness returns. We will see how it goes.) When you adopted the Arc Challenge's title and style, it left me wondering if you were aiming at the same goal. If you were, I wanted to invite you to shoot again, because you kinda missed. However, it seems that "convincing me that Erlang is good at everything" was never your goal at all, so I'm sorry to have interpreted it that way. (My interpretation may have been unduly influenced by the original title of the submission...)

yariv 19y ago
I guess that you and I had different interpretations of the Arc challenge. I thought it was intended to demonstrate how easy it is to implement multi-page flows in Arc by binding closures to links and forms. I didn't think it was intended to convince people that Arc is a good general purpose language because its scope was so narrow (if the challenge were to build a search engine or an image editing tool, it would have been a different story). By the way, although I didn't expect people to extrapolate from the Erlang challenge that Erlang is a good general purpose too, I do think that it is, at least for building backends for a wide range of applications. I wrote a followup on my blog to the Erlang challenge where I listed some of them.

yariv 19y ago

I guess that you and I had different interpretations of the Arc challenge. I thought it was intended to demonstrate how easy it is to implement multi-page flows in Arc by binding closures to links and forms. I didn't think it was intended to convince people that Arc is a good general purpose language because its scope was so narrow (if the challenge were to build a search engine or an image editing tool, it would have been a different story). By the way, although I didn't expect people to extrapolate from the Erlang challenge that Erlang is a good general purpose too, I do think that it is, at least for building backends for a wide range of applications. I wrote a followup on my blog to the Erlang challenge where I listed some of them.