Essentially the same thing happens once you start passing pids around. Everyone has access to whatever that pid will give them. With good design, that can be managed in both paradigms. Look, there is a reason I use Elixir; I believe in its model. But I don’t think its capabilities map well to OOP semantics, and I don’t consider that a problem either as I don’t much care for those semantics.
jeremyjh
LostKobrakai
True, but we have more than just pids to store data in. I’m not so much argueing about what’s possible, but what’s the default. And yes some OOP languages have some datatypes, which are not objects, but as soon as you get to array or hashmaps or whatever dictionary type of the language this gets rarer.
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gregvaughn
José began Elixir as a prototypal OO language. He discussed this in one of his keynotes a few years ago.
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rvirding
Creator of Erlang
I don’t really know how comment on this. Just some points (hopefully not too confusing):
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Concurrency and fault tolernace were fundamental properties of the systems in which we were interested. Without these any solution was not interesting, however cool it might be.
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For us concurrency and parallelism are different things, related but not the same. Concurrency is all about the problem and how you structure your system to solve it, while parallelism is a property of the hardware on which you are running.
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Our goal was to create language, and ways to use it, which supported us in building these types of systems.
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This is why we called them processes as that was how we were thinking.
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The functional nature actually came later. It started out as Prolog and then migrated to a functional language as it better fitted what we felt we needed.
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We were never OO at least clasical OO! At all! There is an OO chapter in the original book but that was more written as a joke. Shh that is a secret.
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We got the feeling that OO languages, at least in those days, were very sequential and not concurrent. While they might talk of “sending messages” it was really just doing a function call. Which was what we didn’t want.
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Doing the right error handling worked much better with processes.
I could go on here but think operating systems!
EDIT: We also felt that OO was very mutable, shared and global concerning data. Everything we didn’t want!
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