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> I agree, Erlang not so much. I thought the same thing once, until I actually sat down and tried to learn Erlang. It turns out that a lot of the decisions tha
by ShaneWilton 10y ago
> I agree, Erlang not so much.
I thought the same thing once, until I actually sat down and tried to learn Erlang. It turns out that a lot of the decisions that I originally thought were asinine, actually make a lot of sense.
Line terminators for example (, ; .) tend to receive a lot of flak, but they really aren't as crazy as they first seem. Commas come after normal lines of code (you can read them as and), semicolons come at the end of clauses in if or case statements (and you can read them as or), and periods mark the end of a function. It's a little more verbose than something like Javascript or Ruby, but it really isn't as confusing as critics tend to claim!
- plainOldText 10y agoOh, absolutely. I'm sure the Erlang inventors weren't crazy, and most of their choices have some reasoning behind them. But I personally find Erlang more difficult to read than other languages.
- pselbert 10y agoThe things that have always tripped me up for Erlang are capitalized variables, lowercase modules, and bare word atoms. There certainly isn't anything wrong with those choices, but it is counter to everything I'm used to from other languages that it presents some cognitive overhead. In the end, even as somebody who cares about the look of code a lot, it doesn't matter to me. The BEAM and OTP are elegant enough to compensate for any syntax.