M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
>  Charles D Hixson wrote:
> > I'm also giving a bit of consideration to Gambit Scheme with 
> > Termite.  (To be honest, the Scheme thing is probably on indefinite 
> > hold...but Termite sounds quite interesting for a few years from now 
> > when more than two processors/CPU becomes common.  [Currently I have 
> > an SMP system with two processors, so this wouldn't buy me much, but 
> > how many CPU slices with my next computer have?])
>  If you want a "core language", Gambit Scheme/Termite is a good choice. 
>  For small/agile production, it's probably adequate. But if you want an 
>  industrial strength large-product software development environment 
>  with the same underlying concurrency semantics (more or less), you 
>  should probably be looking at Erlang/OTP. It's open source (but 
>  standardized by Ericksson) and has lots of infrastructure (compilers, 
>  interpreters, correctness analysis tools, databases, etc.)
> 
There's one (1) text on Erlang, and it's out of print.  There's so 
little documentation of it that when I first encountered it on the web I 
thought it was a new language.

Erlang seems to have a lot of good features, but to me it feels 
moribund.  Even Eiffel appears to have a more vibrant community.  (I'll 
grant that this may be appearance only.)  If I compare that with, say, 
Ada... I don't like the way Ada is headed, but it DOES appear to have a 
community, and well maintained compilers (plus commercial development 
environments that I know nothing about).

If Erlang is to succeed, it needs more examples and more tutorials.  
OTOH, the version I installed this year didn't crash on the example 
programs I tried, unlike the one that I installed last year.  (In both 
cases using the standard Debian repository.)

I don't really like Scheme.  I find Ruby (and Erlang) to be nicer 
languages.  But I may go that way anyway merely because it feels like a 
more enduring distributed environment.  (I'm not sure about termite.  
Apparently it only works with Gambit Scheme, and this seems to imply 
that it's significantly non-standard in very limiting ways.  So I'll 
wait until there's at least a "second source" before committing myself.)

Well, this won't be significant for a few years yet.  Perhaps something 
newer and better will pop up in the meantime.  Or perhaps something will 
happen to change my perception of the current players.  Eventually I'll 
need to decide.  It would be nice if whatever I decided worked well with 
Ruby code.