‪Could we call Erlang/Elixir are Architecture Oriented Languages (AOL)?

[dorgan]

Joe Armstrong liked to use the term “Concurrency Oriented Programming”, there’s even a publication wrote by him

For a language to qualify as a “Concurrent Oriented Language” the following criteria should apply:

• We should be able to create large numbers of processes.
• Processes creation and destruction should be an efficient operation.
• Message passing between process should be inexpensive.
• Processes should share no data and operate as if they ran on physically separated processors

@joeerl

Really we should be thinking in terms of “black boxes that send and receive messages” and “how to wire up the black boxes” and NOT functions with inputs and outputs, the latter problem is solved.

Think - “messages between components” and “what messages do I need in my protocol” NOT “input and output types” and “what functions and modules do I need”

(I called this Concurrency Oriented Programming a while back - but the term did not seem to latch on

As Alan Kay said “the big idea is messaging”

@peerreynders

But going to Erlang/Elixir you are shifting paradigms into “Concurrency Oriented Programming” which means that processes and most of OTP becomes part of the Core rather than being a third party concept