Joe Armstrong About Erlang (interview)

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Erlang-Joe-Armstrong

by silentbicycle • 16 years ago

30 6 16 years ago

fogus• 16 years ago

Classic quote:

You've been reading my OOP sucks blogs. I saw a blog yesterday, they said Erlang is actually more object oriented, truer to the spirit of pure object orientation than all object oriented languages. You could take two views: you could say either Erlang isn't object oriented - which I used to say a few years ago - or you could say it's more object oriented than all the object oriented languages.

davidw2• 16 years ago

Which is a bit glib though; because, especially if you've got something like OTP, you do a variety of things "underneath" that have nothing to do with sending messages back and forth.

masklinn2• 16 years ago

And most OO languages devolve to imperative masses within methods. You could see Erlang as an OO/functional language (similar to OCaml, except asynchronous and dynamically typed) whereas C++, Java or Python are OO/imperative.

jeff95350• 16 years ago

"[in OO programming] I also have what you would call the categorization problem: which object do I put my code in?"

It seems to me like object-oriented style forces hierarchies onto the problem. It's fine to use hierarchies when it is a part of the problem, but when it's not, it causes all kinds of problems.

Erlang doesn't seem to impose hierarchies at all.

masklinn2• 16 years ago

> Erlang doesn't seem to impose hierarchies at all.

True and not true, if you see Erlang as an object oriented language you still have three hierarchies at least:

1. for a given behavior, should it be packaged as a process or as a function? And if it's a function, in which module does it live? Granted, erlang's modules are "flat" so you don't get much of a hierarchy here.

2. Processes are organized in trees, because to send a message to a process you need a reference to it (its pid). Processes can be opted out of a tree by registering it globally, but that's about it. You could argue it's more of a bush as processes can communicate in a ring or with one another.

3. Supervision trees are most definitely hierarchies.

Joe Armstrong About Erlang (interview)

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