A couple of folks have taken me to task over some of the things I said... or didn't say... in my last blog piece. So, in no particular order, let's discuss. A few commented on how I left out commentary on language X, Y or Z. That wasn't an accidental slip or surge of forgetfulness, but I didn't want to rattle off a laundry list of every language I've run across or am exploring, since that list would be much, much longer and arguably of little to no additional benefit. Having said that, though, a more comprehensive list (and more comprehensive explanation and thought process) is probably deserved, so expect to see that from me before long, maybe in the next week or two. Steve Vinoski wrote : In a recent post, Ted Neward gives a brief description of a variety of programming languages. It’s a useful post; I’ve known Ted for awhile now, and he’s quite knowledgeable about such things. Still, I have to comment on what he says about Erlang.... I might have said it like this: Erlang . Joe Armstrong’s baby was built to solve a specific set of problems at Ericsson, and from it we can learn a phenomenal amount about building highly reliable systems that can also support massive concurrency. The fact that it runs on its own interpreter, good; otherwise, the reliability wouldn’t be there and it would be just another curious but useless concurrency-oriented language experiment. Far too many blog posts and articles that touch on Erlang completely miss the point that reliability is an extremely important aspect of the language. To achieve reliability, you have to accept the fact that failure will occur, Once you accept that, then other things fall into place: you need to be able to restart things quickly, and to do that, processes need to be cheap. If something fails, you don’t want it taking everything else with it, so you need to at least minimize, if not eliminate, sharing, which leads you to message passing. You also need monitoring capabilities that can detect failed processes and restart them (BTW in the same posting Ted seems to claim that Erlang has no monitoring capabilities, which baffles me). Massive concurrency capabilities become far easier with an architecture that provides lightweight processes that share nothing, but that doesn’t mean that once you design it, the rest is just a simple matter of programming. Rather, actually implementing all this in a way that delivers what’s needed and performs more than adequately for production-quality systems is an incredibly
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