Re:Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?
by gcb0 on Friday February 21, 2014 @12:53PM
(#7278249)
100% of erlang tutorials are for fibonnaci.
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I once challenged Scott Fritchie to give an Erlang talk at our local ruby group (rum.mn) without implementing Eratosthenes' sieve, and sure enough he did, using elevators of all things.
I was so impressed with Erlang that i'm still banging my head on it nearly 10 (half-hearted) years later.
Re:Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?
by spoiler on Friday February 21, 2014 @02:45PM
(#7278985)
I never understood why every language has a plethora of fibonnaci tutorials. "DO THE FIBONNACI IN X USING Z PROGRAMMING PARADIGM" ok thanks, no more please.
Re:Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?
by scott_s on Friday February 21, 2014 @04:00PM
(#7279403)
Because you already:
1. Know what the Fibonnaci numbers are.
2. How to compute them.
3. Said computation is straight-forward, but it requires some form of looping (either recursion or iteration) and some form of arithmetic.
The combination of those traits means that if I present code to compute the Fibonnaci number for an arbitrary number in some random programming language, you can infer a lot about that programming language. In other words, the only variable in that situation is the programming language itself, which allows you to use the other information you already know to learn about that language relatively quickly.