Published on 22 May 2014.
Yesterday I began reading a book about Erlang. I learned that an Erlang program consists of many concurrent processes that communicate by sending messages to each other.
Then the author surprised me. He compared the Erlang processes to classes in object-oriented languages, and the act of spawning a process to that of instantiating a class. It surprised me for two reasons:
Erlang is a functional language, and one of the firs things I read about are similarities with object-oriented languages.
Processes that communicate by sending messages to each other feel different to me than object-oriented programming as we know it today.
Then I thought about Alan Kay and what he originally envisioned object-oriented programming to be. Perhaps Erlang is the best language to write such programs in? I have to learn more to find out.
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