

Erlang Inventors Talk Language Future - jemeshsu
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/armstrong-virding-erlang-future

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plinkplonk
the infoq page layout is annoying (there is a button for a full page
transcript) and I didn't see much (if anything) about the future of Erlang but
there is some very interesting discussion there

 _Q: There are a lot of ideas about implementing several languages on top of
the same VM. So the JVM has started for Java and it has Java inside like and
all the bytecode is Java like and then people try to implement other languages
or whatever, even Erlang but also various languages like Scala and Ruby and
other things. Is it a good idea?

Joe Armstrong: No, it’s a silly idea.

...

Because the virtual machine is good at nothing. I mean it’s equally bad for
all languages, slightly better for Java than other machines, if you look at
the JVM instructions set and the .Net instructions set, you can’t detect
integer overflows and other things. If you look at JErlang because we do exact
arithmetic you have to detect the overflows into big numbers if you want. So
you have to do the multiplication twice with higher precision and compare and
see you got an overflow, because you can’t get a hold of the overflow flag
which is in the instructions set. So something like the low level virtual
machine is much better. Forget this stuff it was a mistake. It will be a
historical parenthesis.

Robert Virding: I don’t think so actually. ...It might survive Java

...

Joe Armstrong: But the good thing about the JVM is the brilliant
implementation. But I don’t think the abstraction things are very good. You
have to distinguish them... _

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kenjackson
I came here to write about how I hate the infoQ page layout too. The content
on infoQ is really great, but I really dislike the page enough that sometimes
I skip the content. If the webdevs are reading it, a more basic intuitive
layout would be nice.

