Erlang fascinates me. I’ve been selling (and joyfully using) static typing for years, with the premise that compile-time analysis makes for more reliable code. I still am a major fan of static typing. Yet Erlang is dynamically typed and, nonetheless, actually seems to have achieved the holy grail in high-reliability (excluding hard real-time) engineering. [1] There are certainly things, in my view, to be learned from it.
[1] For an anecdote, one of my friends built an Erlang program in the early 2000s and learned recently that his program was still being used in production. I don’t mean that the code was still in use: I mean that the process itself was still running.
Erlang fascinates me. I’ve been selling (and joyfully using) static typing for years, with the premise that compile-time analysis makes for more reliable code. I still am a major fan of static typing. Yet Erlang is dynamically typed and, nonetheless, actually seems to have achieved the holy grail in high-reliability (excluding hard real-time) engineering. [1] There are certainly things, in my view, to be learned from it.
[1] For an anecdote, one of my friends built an Erlang program in the early 2000s and learned recently that his program was still being used in production. I don’t mean that the code was still in use: I mean that the process itself was still running.
I wonder if there’s a way to apply the benefits of OTP to other languages.