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Have you seen Erlang syntax? That's why. Even some of the best programmers I know are very superficial.
by bcrosby95 3y ago
Have you seen Erlang syntax? That's why. Even some of the best programmers I know are very superficial.
- zelphirkalt 3y agoI don't actually find the syntax to be so bad. It can even be pretty neat with the pattern matching.
- 0x457 3y agoI don't think it's bad, but it looks very alien. It's also very simple compared to say JavaScript or really anything else. I understand why Elixir was born.
- aabbcc1241 3y agoMaybe a transpiler and type checker that convert typescript into erlang can help to drive the adoption
- masklinn 3y agoThat’s Elixir, pretty much.
- cjallen88 3y agoPurescript has an erlang backend FYI
- aabbcc1241 3y agoThat's interesting! I think Typescript would be "easier" for a larger group of developers to hook on
- datadeft 3y agoHave you seen the semantical aspects of that syntax?
- bcrosby95 3y agoYou're preaching to the choir. I've been singing the praises of Erlang for about 15 years now - since I discovered it via a competitor's open source project.
- datadeft 3y agoSame to me. I was just wondering. To me the weird part is justified with the expressiveness and the clarity Erlang brings to the table.
- waynesonfire 3y agoThese syntaxes arguments are pathetic. It's actually pleasant to both read and write.
- njharman 3y agoI find C/C++, et al curly brace syntax and semi colon at end of line, maybe; syntax absolutely abhorrent. Erlang reads like a sentence commas, and period at end. There's very little syntax and it makes sense. The problem it is different than what 90% people learned programming on (curly brace languages). But the hard part of Erlang is OTP / understanding the concepts or rather unlearning the concepts from other programming paradigms.
- tkhattra 3y agoi spent a couple of memorable weeks a few decades ago between jobs reading up on erlang, including joe armstrong's (RIP) wonderful phd thesis. when i started, erlang looked "strange" (i hadn't done much prolog in uni). but after being immersed in erlang for a few weeks, when i returned to look at some C/C++ code, they looked positively hideous compared to erlang's higher level functional, and prolog inspired pattern matching syntax.
- pjmlp 3y agoDepends on how much one likes Prolog. Then again, languages lose adoption pitches based on whitespace and tabs significance.
- nvarsj 3y agoIt does look pretty weird if you have only ever worked in an imperative language. If one can get past the initial impression though, they'll find it's actually a very simple, nice language. Much simpler than Scala/C++ and probably even Java these days. Also simpler than other functional languages like Haskell. I picked it up in about 1-2 weeks. There's very few gotchas in the language or hidden complexity. It flows well. I'll also add the language suits the usage pattern. Pattern matching works very well with the gen_server approach. And the binary syntax is so nice if you need to deal with over the wire protocols, as is common in distributed systems.
- SoftTalker 3y agoI like it. It took a bit of getting used to ("bit" here used to mean "pretty minimal amount"). I didn't find it to be any sort of hurdle, and Erlang meshes quite well with how I think about programming. It's my favorite language of any that I've used.