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>But Alan Kay doesn’t say “use Erlang”, nor does he go into any depths about what the desirable feature set is and what would make it work or would fail to make
by Phiwise_ 3y ago
>But Alan Kay doesn’t say “use Erlang”, nor does he go into any depths about what the desirable feature set is and what would make it work or would fail to make it work.
Oh yeah? Then how do you explain this lecture where he says explicitly that Erlang should be the modern programmer's assembly?
https://youtu.be/fhOHn9TClXY https://youtu.be/fhOHn9TClXY
In my experience, people who criticize Kay for being too vague or kvetching too pointlessly or lacking practical experience in computer science today almost always have not bothered to familiarize themselves with the vast majority of his work before deciding their opinion on it. It's hard to disagree with him that this makes us more like a pop culture than a profession after seeing it.
- alexvoda 3y agoYou hit the nail head on. The field of IT is a pop culture and consequently just as prone to fads and periodic fashions.
- Phiwise_ 3y agoIf only. Unix would be dead and buried many years ago if it was just a fad. It's far more like the old repeating fertility rituals of many paganistic societies, where your neighbors burn your pagus down to cleanse the village of the spite of the undead grain god if you plowed your heath in a different direction from everyone else.
- sebastianconcpt 3y agoJust adding here that the understanding of the forces at play in a cultural war makes what you just said even more clear and for a vast spectrum of fields way beyond IT.
- jhbadger 3y agoIt's somewhat of a backhanded compliment though -- calling Erlang a "modern assembly" is like the quip that C is a "portable assembler" -- that is, a tool useful for low-level stuff but which you should mostly use to implement higher level languages on top of.
- Phiwise_ 3y agoI don't agree with this in the context of the full video. I'd encourage you to watch it; it's quite good. It's clear Armstrong and Kay have a great deal of respect for each other.