Cisco says 90% of internet traffic goes through Erlang-controlled nodes

Re:Cisco says 90% of internet traffic goes through Erlang-co... by skissane on Sunday June 03, 2018 @08:37PM (#17223495)

PL/X and PL.8 may have various technical advantages over other languages, but it is hard to judge given IBM's long-standing refusal (going back decades) to publicly release compilers and other tools for them. From a software engineering viewpoint, developing your software in proprietary/in-house/unreleased programming languages – much of z/OS is written in PL/X, while some of the firmware/millicode is in PL.8 – seems to me a rather bizarre decision – not to mention other secret dialects of PL/I IBM has cooked up over the years, such as the PL/MP and PL/MI that were used on the AS/400s, and PL/DS on the IBM 8100. Why not release the languages, try to build some sort of community around them – wouldn't that be good for their long-term health, and the long-term health of the platforms written in them?

(Probably it is way too late for this, but if IBM had been willing to publicly release PL/S tools back in the 1970s, or at least not use their lawyers to stop others from independently doing that, PL/S and its descendants could have become much more significant systems programming languages.)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Cisco says 90% of internet traffic goes through Erlang-co... by pjmlp on Monday June 04, 2018 @03:11AM (#17225293)

Those were the rules of the game back in those days, languages were tied to OS vendors.

UNIX and C only became widespread, because contrary to IBM, DEC, Wang, and many others, AT&T was forbidden to sell UNIX and they started offering it alongside source code for a symbolic price of $100, which was like being free given the prices of other systems.

In any case, that doesn't make C technically better than the alternatives outside AT&T walls, it was just cheaper to get hold of.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Cisco says 90% of internet traffic goes through Erlang-co... by skissane on Monday June 04, 2018 @03:57AM (#17225503)

The folks calling for IBM to release a PL/S compiler were not demanding IBM hand it out for free. They would have been satisfied by IBM offering it for sale on usual commercial terms, for a similar price to IBM's other compilers (PL/I, COBOL, FORTRAN, etc).

But IBM wasn't willing to sell its customers a PL/S compiler.

One reason was that (up until the OCO announcement in 1983) IBM gave its customers the PL/S source code, but not giving them a PL/S compiler discouraged customers from changing the source code, since they couldn't recompile it. Customer modifications had to be made in assembler, which was a lot harder to maintain.

Another reason was to make life harder for competing vendors selling IBM-compatible mainframes, such as Amdahl, Fujitsu and Hitachi.

[ Parent | on HN ]