[mxcl]

Ten months ago RJ wanted to write Playdar in Erlang but was worried about the portability of packaging and distributing the Erlang VM. As it stands this is still an untested area for desktop software… but ten months gives you a long time to think about things, and it's going to work, so yay.

[kingkongreveng_]

Distributing Erlang applications may be untested, but there have been good canned cross platform packagers for Perl for some time now. I'm sure the situation is the same for Python et al.

[gloob]

While what you say is true, I'm not entirely certain what your point is. If distributing Erlang applications is/was untested, and (assuming I understand the article correctly) this is a data point regarding distributing Erlang applications, what do cross-platform packagers for Perl have to do with it?

[kingkongreveng_]

There was no reason to write it in C++ or worry about the difficulties of distributing an interpreter in the first place. There were good tools already. Stepping out on a limb and doing it with Erlang was unnecessary. I thought the thread was fairly obvious.

[gloob]

I'm unclear about what you mean by "unnecessary". In the strict sense, rewriting the software at all was unnecessary; in the very strict sense, writing it in the first place was unnecessary.

My best guess at what you mean is that they incurred unnecessary risk by rewriting it in Erlang as opposed to some more mature language, but even then I'm not certain what would be meant by "risk", given that it's an open-source project that is distributed for free. In that context, it wouldn't be a business risk in any sense (particularly given that one could just decide to scrap the rewrite if it was turning out poorly).

Might it have been easier in Python or Perl? I have no idea, but it seemed to work out well enough in Erlang, so Erlang would appear to qualify as a "good tool" in this case, at least.