> they seem to be oblivious to the fact that Go is C-like and Erlang has a pretty weird Prolog-like syntax.
Yeah it has Prolog-like syntax. However, when designing and working on large distributed system looking at just the syntax is a kind of shortsighted. The problem is not syntax (which is different, and is actually pretty simple, and a lot less ambiguous than say Javascript or has less "features" than C++), the problem is _semantics_. And by that I mean structuring your programs as a set of multiple concurrent actors. That is the hard part.
Another way to put it. Erlang is probably getting looked at because someone wants to either scale, build a distributed system or a highly fault tolerant system. At that point, if dots vs semicolons is a major stumbling block what are they going to do when they hit a netsplit.
Now, Erlang like any tool has trade-offs. But those are about isolation and private heaps vs raw sequential performance. Hot code upgrades and compiled static code and pointers referenced everywhere in the code is not going to work well. Stuff like that. Single assignment is also another common one.
(And if syntax is a major stumbling block, there is Elixir or a lisp like languages LFE and Joxa that all take advantage of the actor model and run on the BEAM VM).
Yeah it has Prolog-like syntax. However, when designing and working on large distributed system looking at just the syntax is a kind of shortsighted. The problem is not syntax (which is different, and is actually pretty simple, and a lot less ambiguous than say Javascript or has less "features" than C++), the problem is _semantics_. And by that I mean structuring your programs as a set of multiple concurrent actors. That is the hard part.
Another way to put it. Erlang is probably getting looked at because someone wants to either scale, build a distributed system or a highly fault tolerant system. At that point, if dots vs semicolons is a major stumbling block what are they going to do when they hit a netsplit.
Now, Erlang like any tool has trade-offs. But those are about isolation and private heaps vs raw sequential performance. Hot code upgrades and compiled static code and pointers referenced everywhere in the code is not going to work well. Stuff like that. Single assignment is also another common one.
(And if syntax is a major stumbling block, there is Elixir or a lisp like languages LFE and Joxa that all take advantage of the actor model and run on the BEAM VM).