4 ms·

It's actually better at pretty much everything because it's functional and not OO. And because it's designed for dealing with errors and crashes. And because it

It's actually better at pretty much everything because it's functional and not OO. And because it's designed for dealing with errors and crashes. And because it has a world class standard library that's fast and totally consistent. And because you can't tack on mutable state everywhere. And because who wants to spend time assigning variables manually when you have amazing pattern matching. And blocking works just fine with zero performance penalty. And because it's made me a better programmer having learned it. And because of OTP/Beam/concurrency|>. And because the first program I wrote in it (a scraper) was so fast it crashed the site I was scraping and I had to start pooling connections.

nilkn 11y ago
> It's actually better at pretty much everything because it's functional and not OO. Just a bit of a funny comment/aside, but the actor-based message-passing concurrency of Erlang/OTP and Elixir is actually pretty similar to the classic object-oriented programming of Smalltalk, etc.
- pmontra 11y ago
  Indeed. I quote Joe Armstrong: "I might think, though I'm not quite sure if I believe this or not, but Erlang might be the only object oriented language because the 3 tenets of object oriented programming are that it's based on message passing, that you have isolation between objects and have polymorphism." http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop
  - andy_ppp 11y ago
    Yes, I hear you. It's strange how OOP got completely bastardised by the industry - anyone know what the process for this was; in my head I'm tempted to blaim C++ and then Java but I think there are probably other culprits that led us away from the path to enlightenment :-)
    - jimbokun 11y ago
      I think the process was just "add object oriented stuff to C". Which, yes, is another way of saying "blame C++ then Java". In general, assuming programmers aren't smart enough to learn a different syntax has always been a winning bet in programming language design.

nilkn 11y ago

> It's actually better at pretty much everything because it's functional and not OO. Just a bit of a funny comment/aside, but the actor-based message-passing concurrency of Erlang/OTP and Elixir is actually pretty similar to the classic object-oriented programming of Smalltalk, etc.

pmontra 11y ago
Indeed. I quote Joe Armstrong: "I might think, though I'm not quite sure if I believe this or not, but Erlang might be the only object oriented language because the 3 tenets of object oriented programming are that it's based on message passing, that you have isolation between objects and have polymorphism." http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop
- andy_ppp 11y ago
  Yes, I hear you. It's strange how OOP got completely bastardised by the industry - anyone know what the process for this was; in my head I'm tempted to blaim C++ and then Java but I think there are probably other culprits that led us away from the path to enlightenment :-)
  - jimbokun 11y ago
    I think the process was just "add object oriented stuff to C". Which, yes, is another way of saying "blame C++ then Java". In general, assuming programmers aren't smart enough to learn a different syntax has always been a winning bet in programming language design.