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Comment by incepted | Hacker News Reader

You're doing some major revisionism with this post and claiming a lot of completely unsubstantiated (and in my opinion, completely made up) facts.

I don't think Gosling, Stallman or Armstrong ever mentioned any basis in genetic science to justify their language. And seriously, think about it... It's completely absurd.

I'm also not sure why you think that returning error codes is "too good for mediocrity to grasp", because in the 21st century, it's considered a very bad practice that leads to extremely unsafe coding practices, which is one of the many reasons why it's been deprecated in most modern languages invented in this century (except Go ;-)).

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Sussman cites a desire to mimic biology in his essay "Building Robust Systems"

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/readings/ro...

It is actually a long story, and it goes back to the old dogma that lists and structures made out of conses are good-enough, almost universal building blocks for code and data. Type-tagging was obviously inspired by DNA, etc.

As for protocols, there is, for some obvious reasons, still nothing better than asynchronous, out of order message-passing over a packet-based networks, with fixed-size header (upon which one could patter-match in a single pass) and adjustable size payloads, which could adapt to a physical channel by adjusting to its frame-size, so, the stdlib and OTP is good-enough and well-balanced and just works.

It is also not a coincidence that Erlang is pure-functional - so is the world of proteins and enzimes.

There is a bit more universality in a chunked linear structures and stateless asynchronous message passing of type-tagged binary data with feed-back loops co-regulation that it seems.)

All things you mention are library-level stuff. It's also no surprise that Erlang is actually a Lisp with Prologish syntax - just take a look at the intermediary language that sits between Erlang and BEAM bytecode ;). Yeah, the one you have to learn about if you want to do parse-transforms.

> Type-tagging was obviously inspired by DNA

Source?

> It is also not a coincidence that Erlang is pure-functional - so is the world of proteins and enzimes.

That world is mostly driven by mutations, which are the exact opposite of functional purity.

I really have no idea where you get all these broken metaphors.

Good polysemous use of the word 'mutations.'

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