Agree, but I am talking about personal preferences – I am getting more fun from Erlang, Scheme, Java (in this order) than I can get using PHP. Sure I will not write any complicated web stuff with Scheme (but it is also possible) but most likely I’ll use for this PHP.

ps Wating for your next erlang post

I can write PHP which is ideal for web stuff. When performance counts I can write PHP extensions or MySQL UDFs in C. But PHP isn’t working well for a daemon and writing a whole app in C is just to much work. This is especially true when you want want concurrency (and with a daemon you usually do). I’ve heard that Erlang is great for this, so I’m taking my first baby steps.

I think different languages serve different purposes, so I’m learning a set of languages to get a job done quickly and well. I’m already noticing that the fact that I (and Javeline as company) can develop in a big set of languages, gives us a huge advantage to those who only know lets say Java.

PS Scheme – is my second favorite, and than goes Java.

Two functions with the same name but different numbers of arguments are actually different functions.

What happens if a pattern match fails depends on the context. If it’s in a function clause or case-, if- or receive clause, the match operation will fall through to the next clause pattern. If there is no more pattern, a runtime exception will be raised.

In all other cases, a runtime exception is raised. This can be caught inline (with catch), or you can let the process die and optionally have this be noticed by another process (more on that in the concurrency course).

Also, strictly speaking, only unbound variables are untyped. Once bound, they become strongly typed. There is no way to subvert the erlang type system.