I recently re-watched "The Lord of the Rings" (LOTR) movie trilogy. Remember the LOTR phrase, "One Ring To Rule Them All"?  Could there ever be "One Programming Language To Rule Them All" (OPLTRTA)?  In the early years of our industry there were loads of new languages appearing each year (History of Programming Languages).  There were also attempts to create best of all worlds programming languages.  PL/I was an attempt to take parts of ALGOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, and added numerous data types, dynam...

Back in May, I wrote a post on "Let It Crash" programming in Erlang, based on Joe Armstrong's paper on the history of the language, and intended to return to other interesting discussions from the paper in a future post. Well, better late than never. Today I'd like to discuss the "success" of Erlang, how it got there, and what it means. Is Erlang successful at all? It's not particularly widely used, there are few books on the subject, and its influence on other languages is debatable. It d...

Back in May, I wrote a post on "Let It Crash" programming in Erlang, based on Joe Armstrong's paper on the history of the language, and intended to return to other interesting discussions from the paper in a future post. Well, better late than never. Today I'd like to discuss the "success" of Erlang, how it got there, and what it means. Is Erlang successful at all? It's not particularly widely used, there are few books on the subject, and its influence on other languages is debatable. It d...

This past weekend I read Joe Armstrong's paper on the history of Erlang. Now, HOPL papers in general are like candy for me, and this one did not disappoint. There's more in this paper that I can cover in one post, so today I'm going to concentrate on one particular feature of Erlang highlighted by Armstrong. Although Erlang is designed to encourage/facilitate a massively parallel programming style, its error handling may be even more noteworthy. Like everything else in Erlang, its error han...

This past weekend I read Joe Armstrong's paper on the history of Erlang. Now, HOPL papers in general are like candy for me, and this one did not disappoint. There's more in this paper that I can cover in one post, so today I'm going to concentrate on one particular feature of Erlang highlighted by Armstrong. Although Erlang is designed to encourage/facilitate a massively parallel programming style, its error handling may be even more noteworthy. Like everything else in Erlang, its error han...