Hey,
I've been reading up on Erlang myself. They have an approach where 
everything is a process and you send messages to these processes. Just 
imagine having a separate process for each Squeak object. They argue that 
processes should be as easy to create as objects. You would think this would 
kill performance, but actually, the systems they have written in it scale 
very well (the web server they wrote in Erlang can handle 10x the capacity 
of a Apache server, if I remember correctly). They also boast numbers of 
99.99999% availablity for the Ericsson switch that was written in mostly 
Erlang. Now, those boasts are what got me interested. It is a functional 
language and they are big on no mutable state like most functional 
languages. They argue that Erlang makes multi-processing easy and in fact 
easier than single process systems. They seem very anti-OO on their list, 
but I have found that the whole process thing maps very well to objects. 
But, I haven't gotten that far. It just seems they have been scarred by the 
{} crowd and static typed OO systems.

I haven't had a whole lot of time to really get much deeper than that. I 
bought the book and have been working through some of the examples. They do 
a lot with pattern matching and it's made me think about certain programming 
topics differently.

I know I wasn't the person you were asking for the answer, but I thought I'd 
chime in.
------------------------------------------------
Blaine Buxton
My Amps: Smalltalk, Lisp, and Ruby
http://www.blainebuxton.com

>From: Daniel Vainsencher <danielv at netvision.net.il>
>Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list 
><squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>CC: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
>Subject: Erlang (was: Re: Generics)
>Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 13:38:37 +0300
>
>Hi Richard.
>
>"Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
> > I like Smalltalk (and Erlang and Prolog) a lot
>[snip]
>
>Sorry about the off topic interjection, but can you write a paragraph or
>two about Erlang? I've tried to get the flavor of it from
>site/documentation, but haven't quite made it yet.
>
>Daniel
>

_________________________________________________________________
Get McAfee virus scanning and cleaning of incoming attachments.  Get Hotmail 
Extra Storage!   http://join.msn.com/?PAGE=features/es