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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Erlang does some stuff very, very well, and other things... perhaps not so well. Also, the syntax for most people is a bit of an initial stumbling block. In other words, I don't think Go is really aimed at Erlang's sweet spot, although perhaps it could be used to build Erlang-like systems, given some time and effort.

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the syntax for most people is a bit of an initial stumbling block

Rewrite in the past tense, and this is an epitaph for any number of "niche" languages. Sad but true. Computer programming would be much better off if it were not so. Cultural expectations are a major factor in initial impressions. Good initial impressions make for a large, vibrant user base.

Python probably "gets it right" in terms of having enough syntax to satisfy expectations, but little enough to make tool writing accessible. (Except for the indentation thing, of course.) Ruby has too much. Smalltalk drops the ball with no precedence rules for math operations. Lisp and Forth are also a bit too weird, especially if your field is not programming and all you want to do is crunch some engineering data.

We need to encourage people to get over their fear of syntax which is not C-like. I find much more pain in C-like syntax being jammed onto new languages than new languages daring to be different (and possibly coming up trumps, or being a disaster, but it's more interesting if they're different and perhaps better in some ways, IMHO).

Sure, but perhaps that is not a battle this particular group wants to fight.

BTW, Erlang's syntax has some annoyances that go beyond just not being C. "Ant turd tokens", for instance. Nothing that's going to stop a competent developer, of course.

I've never got the "And turd tokens" thing after using the language for a few days. It pretty much all makes sense to me.

I've already posted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=837217 to express my opinion on that though, if you want to read it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=837462 - the answer to your post - sums up nicely why they are annoying: they make it so that one line of code is often not interchangeable with the next, so when you refactor or cut and paste, you have to go fiddle with line endings.

Perhaps the "competent developer" is not what they are aiming at, but the masses. In fact, this would explain a lot of languages using C-like syntax if it were true (not to say that those which do are any worse/better than those which do not, he said back-pedalling :).

For an example of the broken stuff, consider string handling: [98, 114, 111, 107, 101, 110] == "broken".

It also doesn't have first class records. A record is nothing but a tuple, with some compile-time sugar that reminds you what the fields are. If Employee records have a name field, then you access it by saying e#Employee.name.

Yeah, the records are ugly.

I'd love to see what Joe would do if he could go off and make an Erlang 2.0 and ditch the backwards compatibility.

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