Charles D Hixson wrote: > There's one (1) text on Erlang, and it's out of print. There's so > little documentation of it that when I first encountered it on the web > I thought it was a new language. Actually, the open source install package contains the entire documentation set in machine-readable form. It's *way* too big to commit to paper. > > Erlang seems to have a lot of good features, but to me it feels > moribund. Even Eiffel appears to have a more vibrant community. > (I'll grant that this may be appearance only.) If I compare that > with, say, Ada... I don't like the way Ada is headed, but it DOES > appear to have a community, and well maintained compilers (plus > commercial development environments that I know nothing about). Erlang is in a very real sense like Java, in that it is both an open source community project *and* a commercial venture by a large corporation, Ericksson. There was an Erlang workshop here in Portland in September. There were about fifty people there, with the largest contingent coming from Amazon. I haven't seen a bunch of Amazon people at the Ruby meetings, so I'm assuming they've made a decision to go with Erlang. > If Erlang is to succeed, it needs more examples and more tutorials. > OTOH, the version I installed this year didn't crash on the example > programs I tried, unlike the one that I installed last year. (In both > cases using the standard Debian repository.) I have the utmost respect for the Debian people, but when I'm trying to learn a new package, I almost always download the upstream source and build it myself, rather than taking a packaged version. Of course, with Gentoo, that's pretty much how the distro works -- just about everything that *can* be built from the upstream source is built that way. :) > I don't really like Scheme. I find Ruby (and Erlang) to be nicer > languages. I have a very fond spot in my heart for Lisp 1.5. Common Lisp is bloated, and Scheme has different semantics. But I think Scheme is much closer to the *spirit* of Lisp 1.5, and it's a heck of a lot easier to implement/hack on than Common Lisp. So I'm becoming a Schemer, although I doubt if it's really as much fun as Forth. :) > But I may go that way anyway merely because it feels like a more > enduring distributed environment. (I'm not sure about termite. > Apparently it only works with Gambit Scheme, and this seems to imply > that it's significantly non-standard in very limiting ways. So I'll > wait until there's at least a "second source" before committing myself.) > > Well, this won't be significant for a few years yet. Perhaps > something newer and better will pop up in the meantime. Or perhaps > something will happen to change my perception of the current players. > Eventually I'll need to decide. It would be nice if whatever I > decided worked well with Ruby code. Well ... of the "current players" I think Erlang is your best bet, but download the latest full Erlang/OTP source and build it yourself, rather than taking the Debian package(s). But in a "few years" I'm sure Ruby, given the backing of Sun and Microsoft that exists today, will have what it needs if the JVM and CLR support the primitives. -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P) http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/ If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.