Friday, June 13, 2008

Erlang is so clear.

Ah the clearness of erlang.

Someone on the yaws list gets errors and asks:
Can any one please explain me what this error is about and how to
overcome this one?
and gets the reply

Well - it's fairly clear. It says:

{undef,[{compile,file,
["/home/phanikar/.yaws/yaws/default/m1.erl",
[binary,return_errors, ...

That means that when .yaws page has been transformed into an
.erl page, the yaws server cannot compile the generated .erl file
You need to have the erlang compiler in the load path
I'm going to assume the author was being sarcastic about that being clear, I mean I get that it couldn't compile something.. but.. no hint of what reasons it couldn't compile.

maybe to quote the awesome tude of of the dynamic window manager guys:
This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions.

Well despite some of these problems erlang is super awesome. It just needs a little more new blood to inject new attitudes of usability [ or some other language will evbentually just steal it's good ideas, which would be a shame.. we have them now. ] Also new attitudes around easier sharing of libraries. [ the erlware guys get that. ].

I'm pretty proud to see Uncle Jesse and the gang here trying to contribute improvements all the time. Better mnesia on disk tables in the works, yaws and erlang patches, erlrc, automatic mnesia fragmentation mangment and loads more. I mean we're building a big and real distributed mnesia backed system so we're learning a lot, and we're certainly not the only ones contributing lately.

So, as a novice who asks stupid questions, I'm telling the rest of you out there not to give up if you run into a few weird error messages or attitudes from language scholars who have been so entrenched they don't see what seems weird at first. Despite those few small speed bumps, there is some really powerful awesome stuff going on here. So, don't let em be elitist barge in there and get some erlang for yourself.

P.S. Pattern matching rules!!!

1 comment:

C Olin said...

Preach it!

As a fellow stupid-questioner, I would like to speak for my kind and say that Erlang is too awesome for me to be dissuaded from its use by the occasional impatient remark.

That said, even when I hit a snag every once in a while, I find the enthusiasm and ambition of key Erlangers such as Yariv Sadan, Ulf Wiger, or Joe himself to be inspiring enough to keep me going.

The establishment of community around any technology is always important when it comes to attracting young blood, so my advice to fellow neophytes is to ignore the geepsters and focus on the staggering possibilities inherent in the language and in the way of thinking from which Erlang has sprung.

{What,Is,Amazing,About,erlang} = {pattern_matching,
message_passing,
process_creation,
trap_exit,
erlang}.