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).
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.