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A comment on The future of programming languages in a massively concurrent world. Parent comment

Re:The future of programming languages in a massively concur... by michaelneale on Sunday November 04, 2007 @05:07PM (#76118)
I don't think erlang is that great for the scenarios that started this thread - it is designed for 1000's of processes, not dozens. And by all reports its straight line performance is much much much slower then anything else out there.

There is of course functional approaches like haskell (but it will take longer to be mainstream).

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Re:The future of programming languages in a massively concur... by davidw on Sunday November 04, 2007 @05:58PM (#76128)
Erlang is functional, but in any case, you're right about its performance - it's more or less that of a fast interpreted language, rather than a compiled language.
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Re:The future of programming languages in a massively concur... by michaelneale on Sunday November 04, 2007 @07:00PM (#76146)
I never thought of it as functional - looked more like little islands of imperative programming to me (I guess I will have to check again).

I think fast interpreted is probably even overstating it, it makes all sorts of compromises. Erlang was also designed for very high availability - so that must cost something as well.

I guess we will see what happens, but I am very skeptical about erlang (not sure why, just a gut feel).

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Re:The future of programming languages in a massively concur... by davidw on Monday November 05, 2007 @03:13AM (#76216)
Erlang is most definitely functional, although it's not as pure as something like Haskell.

In terms of speed, this is something to look at:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=...

It's pretty fast for most things if you use HiPE.

Your skepticism about Erlang is justified in terms of "next big language":

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/10/09/languages-wor...

However, if you use it for what it was created for, it is very nice - it's the best thing out there.

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