Erlang-China

开场白：

Writing Ruby code for a living, building a company in a foreign country, learning a human foreign language (Spanish) and a computer foreign language (Erlang) on the side hasn’t left a lot of time for blogging about Erlang. But in the past month we were able to spend a few minutes w/Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang and certainly the language’s most famous ambassador.

译为白话：

erlanginside 的 Chad DePue 同学，平日里用 Ruby 编点小程序讨生活。他在外国( “东方山寨之国”(中国) ？ “垃圾代码之乡”(印度) ？Kenny Yuan 同学对此亦有贡献)搞了个公司，同时还在学习两门外语，一门是人类语言(西班牙语)，另一门是计算机语言(Erlang)。照理说像他这样的大忙人是不会有太多闲暇可以写博客吹水 Erlang 的。但这几个月来，他有幸和 Joe Armstong 这位 Erlang 界的神人有过数面之缘，故有此博。

对这段简短访谈进行 “超强脱水处理” 得到：

• Joe 老头怒有性格，对 reia 和 f# 不留情面
• Joe 老头对 record 语法看不顺眼了，开始考虑引入 hashmap 设施(最好搞成象 javascript 那样)
• Joe 老头看来还搞了好几种其他的语言，可惜咱们无缘得见
• Joe 老头写书上瘾了

访谈原文照贴如下：

Erlang Inside Interviews Joe Armstrong
Mar 23rd, 2009
by Chad DePue.

In the past year Erlang has started to become much more popular – how has this affected you?

JA: I get invited to a lot of conferences – I used to say yes to every invitation I got, but this got silly. So I now only accept a few per year.

Do you get asked for autographs in the street yet?

JA: No

Seriously, does it seem like Erlang is headed the same way Ruby was 5 years ago?

JA: No idea – but scratch the surface there seems to be lot’s of interesting stuff
going on.

Related to Erlang’s increasing popularity, any thoughts on the proliferation of web platforms for Erlang?

JA: Not really – Erlang wasn’t designed for building web platforms – it was designed for building fault-tolerant systems. Where Erlang seems to excel is in instantant messaging (ejabberd for XMPP and rabbit-MQ for AMQP) and schema-free data-bases (CouchDB, Amazon SimpleDB, Scalaris) etc.

How about Reia – any thoughts about this language? It has mutable variables, among other things…

JA: I haven’t tried it – I don’t like mutable anything

When I try to introduce Erlang to developers, I often get incredulous stares because when they first see the syntax they’re overwhelmed with how unusual it looks. What do you think the major barriers to adoption are with Erlang? Is it syntax or is it unfamiliarity with functional programming? Or something else?

JA: Fear of failure – this is always why people don’t try new stuff. Functional programming takes people out of their comfort zones. Once you get started it’s pretty easy, but the step to getting started is perceived as being large.

If you could change anything about Erlang’s syntax, would you?

JA: The record syntax is a mess, I’d like to introduce hashmaps in some convenient notation …

Do you see language design as a hobby or is this the only language you’ve ever created?

A hobby and obsession. I’ve made several languages – Erlang is the only one that has escaped.

Any thoughts on other functional languages such as Haskell or F#?

JA: I like Haskell very much – not so keen on F# – By tightly integrating with .net you get a lot of benefits but this damages the conceptual integrity of the language.

Any plans for another book?

JA: I’d like to write some more programming books.

misc