Hi Folks --

Erlang is worth looking at.

At 11:53 AM +0000 9/29/03, Blaine Buxton wrote:
>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.

This was the approach of the original Smalltalk. It is also used by 
David Reed in the object-process scheme in Croquet (back to the 
future!).

>Just imagine having a separate process for each Squeak object.

Andreas Raab has made process switching in Squeak extremely efficient ....

>  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,

Then they don't understand OO or history ...

>  but I have found that the whole process thing maps very well to objects.

It does.

>  But, I haven't gotten that far. It just seems they have been 
>scarred by the {} crowd and static typed OO systems.

These are 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

Again, like Smalltalk-72.

>  and it's made me think about certain programming topics differently.

As I mentioned, this approach is well worth studying. It also harks 
back to the tail-recursive ideas of Actors (Carl Hewitt) which were 
derived from Smalltalk, but have many interesting contributions of 
their own.

Cheers,

Alan

>
>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
>>
>
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