Robert Virding

Disclosure: I am a Go contributor and my day job consists in writing and maintaining Erlang systems. I am not biased towards any of them, on the contrary, I really love both languages.

Do you have any arguments about Erlang’s syntax being “actively” clunky, whatever that “actively” means? Or is it just your personal opinion? (This comes immediately to mind: http://rvirding.blogspot.se/2014/01/erlang-syntax-again-and-again-and-again.html)

Another claim that you make without baking is that Erlang is 70-80% redundant “to” Go. Care to elaborate? How have you measured that number?

Let’s go to the next point where you claim that Erlang is a “bad” functional language. What does that mean? “Bad”? What is that? Maybe you mean that it isn’t a pure functional programming language? That’s not a bad thing, nor good, but it’s not bad. Erlang has never aimed to be a pure functional programming language, it aimed at solving a very specific set of problems. Erlang is a functional programming language, and its simplicity, the minimal syntax that you can pick up in a day, actually makes it a really good choice for introducing functional programming to someone who has never had contact with it.

Let me tell you something about Erlang and Go. Contrary to what you have read in the news, Erlang and Go are totally different. As a user of both languages I have no idea what you mean when you say “there's still some nice aspects of the Erlang language as compared to Go, you've still gotten quite a…

Good link.

As a side note, I see sorokin's posts about DCOM, RPC and multi-threading:

> Probably some unique thread-id can be propagated through the calls. And if incoming call has the same thread-id as one of our outgoing call it is handled inside this outgoing call as in nested message loop, otherwise a new thread from thread pool is used. This will create an illusion that two processes share the same set of threads and it works well with mutexes.

I think he is slowly driving towards an actor like message passing thing like Erlang, Akka or Orleans without even realizing.

Which reminds me of Virding's law:

http://rvirding.blogspot.com/2008/01/virdings-first-rule-of-programming.html

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Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Erlang.

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I am not going to enter into a syntax argument I have already given my views on that here http://rvirding.blogspot.se/2014/01/erlang-syntax-again-and-again-and-again.html . My main point is that the syntax is simple and that it fits the semantics much better than anything based on an Algol like syntax would, even one which uses ';' in the "normal" way.

And one reason it works is because it has built-in those features for building fault-tolerant systems which, for example, Go lacks. Borrowing from NASA "Failure is not an option".

You can use that to replace code by monkey patching

$ cat hi.rb
def method
puts "hi"
end
method
load("hello.rb")
method

$ cat hello.rb
def method
puts "hello"
end

$ ruby hi.rb
hi
hello

You must engineer your application to execute the load method and that's it.
However I wonder if this is really equivalent to what Erlang does. I remember http://rvirding.blogspot.it/2008/01/virdings-first-rule-of-programming.html

Virding's First Rule of Programming:

Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Erlang.

https://rvirding.blogspot.com/2008/01/virdings-first-rule-of-programming.html

(he is one of the creators of erlang / stars in Erlang the Movie)