Software Engineering Matters : Erlang

Comment on Erlang by Per Melin

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:23:08 -0700

I don't follow your logic that concludes that Erlang is a large language? The primitives for processes and concurrency are few and simple.

Comment on Erlang by Nicholas Chen

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:52:53 -0700

Thanks for the comment. I am still experimenting with the language so I am not familiar with most of its semantics yet.
I (mistakenly) drew the conclusion that it was large from this paragraph in Section 2.3 of the paper: "Much of what took place in the POTS project set the scene for what would become Erlang, so it is interesting to recall some of the conclusions from the SPOTS paper". Below that line, it mentions that smaller languages were favored in contrast to large languages. I had wrongly assumed that this was a comment of Erlang - which was not even conceived yet at that point!

Comment on Erlang by Per Melin

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:25:04 -0700

The book is about 500 pages, but when you make it to 170 or so you know the full language. The rest is libraries/OTP, examples and databases.