4 ms·

Your sense of nice conflicts with Erlang's goal of supporting reliable systems. For example, Erlang is not designed using the paradigm du jour. It may seem like

by tormeh 11y ago

Your sense of nice conflicts with Erlang's goal of supporting reliable systems. For example, Erlang is not designed using the paradigm du jour. It may seem like Erlang borrows from functional programming, but Erlang's designers invented all that independently because it supported writing reliable systems. Concise and maintainable are antagonistic qualities, and so Erlang's designers sacrificed all the conciseness they could get away with. Erlang is not deisgned to be nice, elegant or have any other property people normally advertise their language as having. Erlang is designed so that programmers at Ericsson could write better code for phone switches, with constant feedback from said programmers. That's Erlang's mission statement, originally. If you want concise actors, Scala with Akka allows you to write pretty unreadable code if you want to.

incepted 11y ago
> Concise and maintainable are antagonistic qualities Uh? How so? That's quite a strange argument to rationalize Erlang's verbosity and boiler plate.
SEMW 11y ago
> Your sense of nice conflicts with Erlang's goal of supporting reliable systems. Obvious counterexample: Elixir. Plenty of modern niceties that Erlang lacks (rubyesque syntactic sugar, scheme-style hygenic macros, the pipe operator, mix, etc), but shares most of Erlang's semantics and ultimately compiles down to the same bytecode, so AFAICS doesn't sacrifice any of the things that make Erlang good for building reliable systems.
- simoncion 11y ago
  This in no way diminishes the power of your counterexample, but -AIUI- Elixir is implemented as a bunch of macros on top of Erlang.
- tormeh 11y ago
  Syntax is crucial when developing for reliability. Brainfuck trivially proves this. Both semantics and syntax need to support reliability.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    > Syntax is crucial when developing for reliability. Brainfuck trivially proves this. Both semantics and syntax need to support reliability. This is an almost content-free comment. You could have made your comment substantially better by giving some examples of language syntax that makes it easier to write reliable code than unreliable code. I think that we all agree that Brainfuck and Whitespace are two examples of languages that are very difficult to read. A comment along the lines of "Languages that are difficult to read do not support reliability." is also almost content-free and probably not entirely true. (Some people find C terribly difficult to read -for some reason or other- but very reliable systems have been written in it.[0]) :) [0] Yes, a quint-squillion unreliable and even dangerous systems have also been written in C. This doesn't invalidate my point.
  - SEMW 11y ago
    I'm not sure if you're implying that Elixir's syntax makes it less good at developing for reliability than Erlang. If so, I'd appreciate if you could explain your thinking further -- if the existence of brainfuck proves that Erlang's syntax is better than Elixir's at developing for reliability, I'm afraid the nature of that proof is eluding me.

by tormeh 11y ago

incepted 11y ago

> Concise and maintainable are antagonistic qualities Uh? How so? That's quite a strange argument to rationalize Erlang's verbosity and boiler plate.

SEMW 11y ago

> Your sense of nice conflicts with Erlang's goal of supporting reliable systems. Obvious counterexample: Elixir. Plenty of modern niceties that Erlang lacks (rubyesque syntactic sugar, scheme-style hygenic macros, the pipe operator, mix, etc), but shares most of Erlang's semantics and ultimately compiles down to the same bytecode, so AFAICS doesn't sacrifice any of the things that make Erlang good for building reliable systems.

simoncion 11y ago
This in no way diminishes the power of your counterexample, but -AIUI- Elixir is implemented as a bunch of macros on top of Erlang.
tormeh 11y ago
Syntax is crucial when developing for reliability. Brainfuck trivially proves this. Both semantics and syntax need to support reliability.
- simoncion 11y ago
  > Syntax is crucial when developing for reliability. Brainfuck trivially proves this. Both semantics and syntax need to support reliability. This is an almost content-free comment. You could have made your comment substantially better by giving some examples of language syntax that makes it easier to write reliable code than unreliable code. I think that we all agree that Brainfuck and Whitespace are two examples of languages that are very difficult to read. A comment along the lines of "Languages that are difficult to read do not support reliability." is also almost content-free and probably not entirely true. (Some people find C terribly difficult to read -for some reason or other- but very reliable systems have been written in it.[0]) :) [0] Yes, a quint-squillion unreliable and even dangerous systems have also been written in C. This doesn't invalidate my point.
- SEMW 11y ago
  I'm not sure if you're implying that Elixir's syntax makes it less good at developing for reliability than Erlang. If so, I'd appreciate if you could explain your thinking further -- if the existence of brainfuck proves that Erlang's syntax is better than Elixir's at developing for reliability, I'm afraid the nature of that proof is eluding me.