3 ms·

It would be nice if you could add a citation, or elaborate a little bit!

• vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  I think the parent poster's point is more that the article's extensive focus on side effects and monadic encapsulation as the central concern for reliable software engineering is short-sighted, as Erlang is a dynamically typed impure functional language that nevertheless is robust in its use of multi-node distribution, supervisor trees, sophisticated error/exception models, scheduling guarantees, SMP, dynamic code upgrade as first-class VM constructs, as well as the language itself being homoiconic and driven by a small number of basic data structures (tuples and lists). The language's module system offers namespacing and then the OTP framework implements standard behaviors that have (in gen_server's case) state calculation, supervision, code change, termination and messaging callbacks all exported. I presume "surviving hardware failures" was in reference to native Erlang epmd machine distribution, which is intended for fault tolerance and based on heartbeats. It's one step further than most languages go. Ultimately, there is much more to be considered than state and side effects.
  • j-pb 11y ago
    Yes, exactly. Well put :)