Charles D Hixson wrote:
>  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.
Actually, the open source install package contains the entire 
documentation set in machine-readable form. It's *way* too big to commit 
to paper.
> 
>  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).
Erlang is in a very real sense like Java, in that it is both an open 
source community project *and* a commercial venture by a large 
corporation, Ericksson. There was an Erlang workshop here in Portland in 
September. There were about fifty people there, with the largest 
contingent coming from Amazon. I haven't seen a bunch of Amazon people 
at the Ruby meetings, so I'm assuming they've made a decision to go with 
Erlang.
>  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 have the utmost respect for the Debian people, but when I'm trying to 
learn a new package, I almost always download the upstream source and 
build it myself, rather than taking a packaged version. Of course, with 
Gentoo, that's pretty much how the distro works -- just about everything 
that *can* be built from the upstream source is built that way. :)
>  I don't really like Scheme.  I find Ruby (and Erlang) to be nicer 
>  languages.
I have a very fond spot in my heart for Lisp 1.5. Common Lisp is 
bloated, and Scheme has different semantics. But I think Scheme is much 
closer to the *spirit* of Lisp 1.5, and it's a heck of a lot easier to 
implement/hack on than Common Lisp. So I'm becoming a Schemer, although 
I doubt if it's really as much fun as Forth. :)

>   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.
Well ... of the "current players" I think Erlang is your best bet, but 
download the latest full Erlang/OTP source and build it yourself, rather 
than taking the Debian package(s). But in a "few years" I'm sure Ruby, 
given the backing of Sun and Microsoft that exists today, will have what 
it needs if the JVM and CLR support the primitives.

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.