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A comment on Reia: Friendly, Ruby-style syntax on the Erlang VM.

Re:Reia: Friendly, Ruby-style syntax on the Erlang VM by jwecker on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @02:13PM (#2009370)
I too have been following Reia since he started it up and... well, I'm consistently disappointed. I'm putting this out there publicly because it's come up with co-workers. In the end, he's waffled with so many language design decisions that, in my opinion at least, it's turned into a language that on one end doesn't have the true syntactical flexibility of Ruby, and on the other side has buried a lot of what is most useful in Erlang. For alternatives I would suggest Lisp Flavored Erlang http://forum.trapexit.org/viewtopic.php?p=40268 or Efene / Ifene http://www.marianoguerra.com.ar/efene/ - both of which do much better at being Erlang-(but-with-better-syntax).

Edit: This is referring to its current state only- I reserve the right to change my mind in the future (:

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Re:Reia: Friendly, Ruby-style syntax on the Erlang VM by bascule on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @06:37PM (#2010362)
Hi, Reia's my thing. My view on waffling on language design decisions:

If you're working on a language project, fuck it up, and don't do a rewrite, you get PHP.

That said, your other criticisms are valid: much of Erlang's functionality doesn't have first class Reia support (but is still directly callable through the presently undocumented Erlang interfacing syntax)

Many of Ruby's great features aren't available in Reia yet either. I'm shooting for a subset of Ruby's metaprogramming features which aren't incompatible with Erlang-style code loading.

I hope you'll continue to watch the project.

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Re:Reia: Friendly, Ruby-style syntax on the Erlang VM by jwecker on Thursday December 16, 2010 @12:00PM (#2012665)
The word waffling was too negative, and you're right. I apologize and I'll definitely keep watching. Erlang and Ruby are my two favorite languages as well, so if you do pull it off at some point, you'll have my support (:
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