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by eggy 3617 days ago
No, it is built right on top of Erlang for seamless integration, and of note is that it was created by Robert Virding, one of the original creators of Erlang along with Joe Armstrong.

LFE macros deliver true homoiconicity to Erlang. It is a Lisp 2, and supports function and macro definitions at the REPL.

I prefer it to Elixir, because I prefer Lisp. Robert has also created a Lua 5.2 written in pure Erlang.

Evidently, Erlang's actors and BEAM VM were influenced by the JVM and Scala, so I guess doing a JVM Erjang was in the cards. [1]

[1] https://www.infoq.com/news/2011/04/erlang-copied-jvm-and-sca...
3 comments
TeMPOraL 3617 days ago
It's the other way around. AKKA started as a straight copy of Erlang actor model[0]. And Scala is much younger than Erlang.

EDIT: Oh wait, I got myself baited.

[0] Source: the original author of AKKA admitted it on a Java conference I attended.

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pessimizer 3617 days ago
Erlang Copied Scala's Actors & Erlang's VM is almost a Clone of the JVM - Apr 01, 2011

Erlang was released in 1986, Java in 1995, and Scala in 2004.

I wouldn't be surprised if LFE were older than Scala.

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dozzie 3617 days ago
According to Wikipedia, work on BEAM started in 1992. Still earlier than Java.

LFE appeared in 2008, so it's newer than Scala.

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eggy 3617 days ago
Erlang was released into the 'wild' in 1988, but it had a Prolog-based VM, or JAM, Joe's Abstract Machine before the BEAM.[0]

The BEAM VM was being worked on in 1992 a year after work on Java in 1991.

[0] http://erlang.org/faq/implementations.html

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dozzie 3615 days ago
> The BEAM VM was being worked on in 1992 a year after work on Java in 1991.

You're right. What I meant by "still earlier than Java" is "still earlier than first public Java version", so there was no possibility to borrow anything.

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strmpnk 3617 days ago
BEAM was just one of a series of virtual machines that implement the Erlang language, so it's not really fair to compare it to Java (just as HotSpot was built a few years after Java).
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plug 3617 days ago
That article was posted on April 1st 2011...
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strmpnk 3617 days ago
I was about to mention that was backwards but forgot about that silly April fools joke. That was worth a good laugh this morning.
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