The InfoQ interviewer was terrible though :P. He puts the breaks on a good discussions multiple times. The interviewer doesn't ask very many good questions from the context of Erlang or Haskell.
They're both pretty nice guys, always civil in their opinions (a bit less for Joe Armstrong when he talks about OOP). Their talks are pretty much always interesting, and they both have a tendency to use Comic Sans MS in their slides.
Spoiler alert: My favorite part is how the interviewer reacts when Armstrong mentions Prolog. :)
sadache@twitter
The second question ("Haskell and Erlang have 2 distinct models of concurrency, right? Haskell is going to side-effect free, Erlang is about messaging. Can you talk a bit about this in contrast to both models of concurrency?") was especially interesting to me. I'm not experienced with functional programming, and I'm interested in the unique characteristics of Haskell and Erlang. This question directed Armstrong's and Jones' discussion towards the differences in the languages, even though they did not clearly answer to the question.
For the sake of feedback, the question starting with "Yes. This is in sync with how things happen, but sometimes it gets out of sync. It's the same thing with when you are dealing with processors"(...) was a bit hard to grasp. The mental models related each programming languages are interesting, but your question directed the discussion away from the issue of mental models. Perhaps asking "what do you see as the mental models of Haskell and Erlang" would have done the job?
Anyway, thanks for the interview, it was beneficial to me, and I'm surely not the only one.
Regarding my reaction, it certainly wasn't meant aggressive, but it was a negative review. I appreciate you getting these two together for an interview, and their disucssion was awesome. So thank you for that, but as I said previously... your questions seemed to interrupt a good flow of conversation that Armstrong and Jones had for the sake of asking a question.
You asked several questions, asserting them in the context of scala. It would have been my personal preference to have JA and SPJ talk about the two languages (Erlang/Haskell) in relation of each other. A compare/contrast, pros/cons, from their perspectives.
Finally, these series of questions below, didn't yield information specific to the languages and the setup of the questions left me confused.
That takes us to a discussion about user's model. For me, as a user of Haskell, I have a mental model that everything is happening by the end. That's what the type system tells me - that everything is saved until the end. Yes. This is in sync with how things happen, but sometimes it gets out of sync. It's the same thing with when you are dealing with processors. You are sending messages, but sometimes it's maybe not that cheap to send a message and also it hits barriers of using this mental model that you established. What do you think of this problem? With any feature of the language, you define a mental model for the programmer, so that the programmer can reason about this feature. The implementation tries to get in sync with this mental model, but it's not always true. In some cases, it gets far from it. It's the same thing with processors, when you are sending messages. It's not exactly the same thing, because you need to copy or you don't need to copy. Sometimes it's not performant to do it that way, you do it another way. What do you think of this problem? The same thing with I/O, that as a programmer I think that is happening by the end, but it is actually happening on the fly, it's happening right away.
With all that said, I'm an avid infoq website fan and I do appreciate you getting this interview and your work. I apologize for coming across aggressive, as I certainly didn't mean too. (hence the :P)
Well - who wouldn't look like a bit of a bozo next to those two guys? I know I would.
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Also, I thought the _Coders at Work_ interviews were quite good (I've read about half, so far), but found the _Masterminds of Programming_ disappointing (except the one with Chuck Moore).