Hacker News Reader

This comment doesn’t seem to be a response to anything in the article, which is talking primarily about input and output languages (output here meaning error messages) of compilers. The article does not compare anything about C++ and Erlang beyond compiler error messages.

View on HN

Right my point is that the article cherrypicked a single thing and made a general claim about Erlang being a "true computer language" which is what I take umbrage to.

Language is something you can conduct a dialog in. In most of the computer languages you can't.

I'm not saying that C++ (or any other) is in any way inferior to Erlang because of human-readable error messages. But this property to communicate back and forth in the same language is definitely interesting.

Right but if you make the language as natural as possible for the human, you introduce layers of abstraction that make it difficult or impossible to understand what's happening at the machine level.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com