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Were any other languages in contention here, or was it a “use what you know” kind of situation? As much as I would also like to be paid to write lisp, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the scarier problems solved were reasons others had chosen/built erlang.

Great post, cool system!

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Yes it was some of that certainly. I could gauge roughly what kind of effort the problem would take, what kind of constraints it would have to run with and select among the tools I am comfortable with. I read about Erlang but never did anything with it. From what I know though it would not necessarily be better at this job than CL and learning another language on the go was not in the plans.

But isn't it the deal with all programming language choices? Ultimately the only true programming language is machine code, the rest are just abstractions for our wetware's benefit.

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