Erlang - The Next Great Programming Language?
Posted by Luke Ludwig Thu, 04 Oct 2007 13:13:00 GMT
Erlang - The Next Great Programming Language? I don't think so. I probably shouldn't be doing this. At least not yet. I just don't know enough about Erlang to make any predictions. I haven't written any Erlang code myself. This will change shortly, as the book is on its way. I guess I am impatient. And curious to see if my opinion will change.
All signs seem to point to Erlang being the next great programming language. It has momentum, it has hype, it even has the Pragmatic Programmers on its side. And like Ruby, it has a killer app -- parallel processing. Ruby's killer app is Rails of course, which greatly eases the burden in developing web applications. Ruby is the latest great programming language. For the past 3-4 years Ruby (and Rails) is the language that everyone has been talking about, the language that all the talented programmers want to learn in their spare time. Before Ruby, Python may have stood for a short time on the latest great programming language podium. Python never quite had the killer app that Ruby does with Rails, but it still shocked the world (well, the world of nerds anyway) with its pseudocode look and its use of whitespace. Before Python there was Java, and before Java C++, and before C++ there was C. I wasn't programming at the time, but yes people I believe if you could travel back in time there was a point where C was the latest cool programming language that all the cool kids (aka major nerds) had to try out.
And now Erlang? Certainly it seems like all the cool kids are sneaking off to become Erlang experts during their lunch break. Which is the beginning of how the next great programming language comes to be. Due to its killer app, parallel processing, Erlang is impossible to ignore. Multi-core computers are now a reality, with more cores coming out every year. Intel could have 32 cores by 2010. The tides have turned and the software world now lags behind the hardware world. In the past we always had software programs that would consume the available processor time or eat up all the RAM. But now, with 32 cores just around the corner, very few software programs will be able to take advantage of this. Unless Erlang becomes the next great programming language, and quickly.
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