Brian's Waste of Time

Mon, 11 Jun 2007

Scala and Erlang

David Pollak mentioned, in comments, about Scala's advantages over Erlang. I wanted to comment that, while the concurrency stuff in Erlang is all nice, and so on, it doesn't stop at the actor model. From my perspective, the support for distributed computing built into it so naturally is an equally killer feature. How distribution works falls naturally from how concurrency works, and global and rpc being built in to the standard library is non-trivial. More processors in a machine is nice and all, but it is still way cheaper, and I think will be for a while yet, to throw a couple thousand two core (soon eight or sixteen core) machines at a problem than one four thousand core machine.

I still believe that whatever the next dominant language is, it will look and smell a lot like Scala. Scala is darned tootin cool, even if the level of magic in it scares me (inside joke for David E., who still lacks a blog).

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