Re: [Caml-list] ReasonML concrete syntax

[Jesper Louis Andersen <jesper.louis.andersen@gmail.com>]

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On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 5:43 PM Evgeny Khramtsov <xramtsov@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> There is a very similar story: Erlang and Elixir. If somebody doesn't
> know: Elixir runs in Erlang VM (BEAM) and has Ruby-like syntax (Erlang,
> on its turn, has obscure for many Prolog-like syntax). No doubt, Elixir
> became more popular than Erlang (at least, judging by Github stars),
> but still not popular enough (below top20 in any language charts). I
> think this is because it's still functional language and this distracts
> many. Furthermore, such separation splitted the community into two
> camps, writing the same tools/programs, but only in different languages.
> What's worse, now all job offers contain Erlang/Elixir requirement
> (which makes no sense to me, frankly).
>
>
FWIW, I think the Erlang community is greatly benefiting from the Elixir
community and vice versa. I'd hope the same thing happens with ReasonML and
OCaml.

Elixir got a pretty firm ground to stand on since you have many years of
(industrial) backing in the Erlang ecosystem. But a lot of the better
improvements in the quality-of-life of a programmer is a direct result of
Elixir's core team wanting to improve notation, error reporting and so on
for the developer. These changes are definitely improving Erlang as well.

I think it is wrong to see these things as "wars". People, when
programming, are subjective and prefer different notations. I've always
been partial to statically typed ML languages such as OCaml and Standard
ML, and I find their notation more clear than e.g., the Erlang or Haskell
notation[0]. But judging by people in general, '{' / '}' bracketed notation
stemming from a language such a C looks to be extremely popular and familar
to people. To the point where "Erlang syntax is ugly", in which as much is
misunderstood about its semantics as are its syntax.

The key point is that you have a large group of programmers, mostly
Javascript, Python or Ruby people, who would never ever pick up Erlang due
to its syntax. But they'll gladly pick Elixir as their core language. All
we have to teach them is proper error handling Erlang/OTP style and they'll
easily give back to the community at large. If there are a good argument
for diversity in an ecosystem, this is really it.

[0] I may be "Erlang user of the year, 2017", and have many years of Erlang
experience, but I've always lamented that the language has no static type
system.

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