Question

Where would Erlang fall on the spectrum of conciseness between, say, Java/.net on the less concise end and Ruby/Python on the more concise end of the spectrum? I have an RSI problem so conciseness is particularly important to me for health reasons.

Answer 1

Conciseness as a language feature is ill defined and probably not uniform. Different languages could be more or less concise depending on the problem.

Erlang as a functional language can be very concise, beyond Ruby or Python. Specifically pattern matching often replaces if statements and recursion and list comprehensions can replace loops.

For example Java would have something like this:

String foobar(int number){   if (number == 0) {     return 'foo';   } else if (number == 1) {     return 'bar';   }   throw new Exception(); } 

while Erlang code would look like:

foobar(0) -> 'foo'; foobar(1) -> 'bar'. 

With the exception being inherent because there is no clause for input other then 0 or 1. This is of cause a problem that lends itself well to Erlang style development.

In general anything you could define as a transformation will match a functional language particularly well and can be written very concise. Of cause many functional language zealots state that any problem in programming is a transformation.