Er, which lang to use?

I have been fretting over which programming language to use to build my first Semantic Vector Space and Wisdi implementation. This was a big decision. On one hand, I was tempted to uses C++ because am an expert in it and have become enamored with modern C++ development techniques that are exemplified by the STL and Boost libraries. I also knew I can make the code smoking fast. On the other hand, I knew I would wrestle with all the usual issues that C++ developers wrestle with (pointer corruption, memory management, increasing build times) and they would distract from an effort that is still much more R than D.

A compromise seemed to be Java 5 (or 6). Generics removed some of my disdain for the language. However, generics are not C++ templates and sometimes having half of something can be more painful than having none.

I also (very briefly) considered Ruby, Python and even Mathematica but none of these would do for reason that are both logical and admittedly emotional.

This past Wednesday a received a copy, fresh of the press, of Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World by Joe Armstrong. That clinched it for me.

The great thing about Erlang is that I practically knew it already because many of the constructs related to list processing and pattern matching are similar or identical to two languages I am comfortable (Prolog and Mathematica). The second trait was that it is an very clean functional language and I always wanted to do a large development project in a functional language. Third, and unique for functional languages, it lets you go way down close to the metal and manipulate arbitrarily complex binary structures with out escaping to C. Fourth, you can escape to C. Fifth, and by far the most important, Erlang will scale due to its elegant concurrency model and it will do so with out all the typical headaches associated with writing concurrent code. And finally, I imagine the capability of hot swapping will be welcome when exposing ones creations to the world and getting that first bug report.

Now, Erlang is not perfect; no language is. It sacrifices type safety and does not have a good security model for distributed computing. However, when almost all your D is to drive R then these issues are less important.

So it begins this weekend. Me and Erlang are about to become quite intimate. Time to brew a big pot of coffee. See you on Monday.