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This is such utter nonsense. I've programmed professionally in both C++ and Erlang and while there are situations where Erlang might shine, there are issues whe
by banachtarski 7y ago
This is such utter nonsense. I've programmed professionally in both C++ and Erlang and while there are situations where Erlang might shine, there are issues where it completely loses to C++, namely, cases where you need a lower level of abstraction. I don't see people writing video and audio codecs in Erlang as there are no real abstractions for SIMD and no latency guarantees. Erlang supports concurrency in its virtual machine, but no support for real parallelism (e.g. you can't control when context switches occur, or finely control flow control in general). While I was programming in Erlang, I loved aspects of the language, but found Erlang apologists who didn't really understand native programming to be insufferable.
- joppy 7y agoThis comment doesn’t seem to be a response to anything in the article, which is talking primarily about input and output languages (output here meaning error messages) of compilers. The article does not compare anything about C++ and Erlang beyond compiler error messages.
- banachtarski 7y agoRight my point is that the article cherrypicked a single thing and made a general claim about Erlang being a "true computer language" which is what I take umbrage to.
- okaleniuk 7y agoLanguage is something you can conduct a dialog in. In most of the computer languages you can't. I'm not saying that C++ (or any other) is in any way inferior to Erlang because of human-readable error messages. But this property to communicate back and forth in the same language is definitely interesting.
- banachtarski 7y agoRight but if you make the language as natural as possible for the human, you introduce layers of abstraction that make it difficult or impossible to understand what's happening at the machine level.