Re:An Open Letter to the Erlang Beginner (2011)
by rdtsc on Monday May 19, 2014 @10:27AM
(#7767549)
> Jlouis had great arguments on the syntax with regards to his post: you have to differentiate semantics from syntax itself. Erlang's semantics are what should be seen as important, but it's rarely done.
Erlang syntax is small and self-consistent. Yes, it is not familiar. But those are orthogonal. There are languages with curly braces and ; that are terribly complicated, with ambiguous complicated syntax (C++), or ambiguous weak types (JS).
My way to look at it, if syntax is the biggest stumbling block, that is a warning sign that it will probably be hard to handle more difficult things -- thinking in terms of actors, reasoning about distributed systems, figuring out supervision hierarchies and so on.
BUT, as some mentioned here, there is Elixir. You get something like Ruby syntax. And you get variable-reassignment (x=1 then x=2 works). So maybe that helps there too. One still need to learn the semantics of it. You still have applications, supervisors and actors.
Erlang syntax is small and self-consistent. Yes, it is not familiar. But those are orthogonal. There are languages with curly braces and ; that are terribly complicated, with ambiguous complicated syntax (C++), or ambiguous weak types (JS).
My way to look at it, if syntax is the biggest stumbling block, that is a warning sign that it will probably be hard to handle more difficult things -- thinking in terms of actors, reasoning about distributed systems, figuring out supervision hierarchies and so on.
BUT, as some mentioned here, there is Elixir. You get something like Ruby syntax. And you get variable-reassignment (x=1 then x=2 works). So maybe that helps there too. One still need to learn the semantics of it. You still have applications, supervisors and actors.