Why Not Erlang? The Lack of Onramps

Re:Why Not Erlang? The Lack of Onramps by csmattryder on Monday June 23, 2014 @02:20AM (#7930498)

I know it's not full-on adoption, but one thing I noticed is that Erlang.org lacks an interactive REPL on their website, instead opting to just post a factorial demo[1] without really explaining it (akin to tryruby.org et al.)

A quick Google found TryErlang.org, which doesn't seem to be linked to the official Erlang website.

I'm a lot more inclined to learn about a language if I can try it in my browser without a download required. TryRuby.org was my first taster in Ruby and here I am 2 years later.

[1] http://www.erlang.org/static/getting_started_quickly.html

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Re:Why Not Erlang? The Lack of Onramps by colanderman on Monday June 23, 2014 @02:51AM (#7930576)

Erlang-the-language, as in what you can do from the REPL, is wholly non-interesting. It's a very basic functional language with message passing and process linking. The message passing and process linking are rather awkward to use from the REPL, leaving you with just a basic functional language.

Erlang-the-platform (i.e. OTP) is what's interesting. You can't really make OTP applications in the REPL, they consist of several modules with actual code requiring a modicum of forethought and design.

(Something more-than-a-REPL could be interesting, which helps you create an OTP tree complete with skeleton code. But at that point you're pretty much asking for a web-based IDE, and the prospective developer still needs to understand how to structure an application as processes.)

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