vinoski

Correct -- immediately after the video was posted to InfoQ I posted a comment there to clarify and correct that error:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Erlang-OTP-Behaviors#anch...

Don't get me wrong, we did a lot of good work in CORBA and learned a lot while doing it, people still use it, it's still very widely deployed, and a ton of interesting research was done based on CORBA. But one of the reasons I think so highly of Erlang is that it treats distributed system concerns as first-class citizens, whereas CORBA was born of RPC notions of trying to hide distribution behind programming languages. Now, it's not entirely as black-and-white as I just stated it, but that's one of the fundamental differences. Erlang just gets a whole bunch of things right.

The talk is really about using Erlang in a hardware multimedia switch. I briefly mentioned CORBA within the talk because I spent about 16 years working on it, and was comparing it to Erlang.

In a private conversation some years ago, Tim BL told me that he used to use Apollo workstations back in the 1980s and that he really liked Apollo Domain/OS, so he took the // from the Domain distributed filesystem, which used // as a way of addressing possibly remote files, i.e., //hostname/path/to/file . I suspect the \\ in Microsoft UNC pathnames is also derived from the same, probably due to Paul Leach's influence there as he was also from Apollo.