[E-Lang] what is good about E?

[Bill Frantz]

At 12:20 PM -0700 7/17/01, Marc Stiegler wrote:
>> Also, even though it's been mentioned in passing in this thread, I find
>the
>> absence of deadlocks to be a major reason to use E.  Security is nice, but
>> completely removing the ability to express an entire class of errors is a
>> very attractive feature, a point not highlighted enough in marketing E
>IMHO.
>
>No point is highlighted enough in E marketing, since there is virtually no E
>marketing in the world today (though that is going to change in the next 6
>months).
>
>I do include deadlock-free concurrency in my elevator pitch, you just don't
>hear my elevator pitch here on e-lang :-) But I agree it is a great feature:
>not only does it remove an entire class of errors, it removes an entire
>class of really hard to find really hard to fix errors. Indeed, since we now
>seem to have garbage collection in the major languages going forward,
>deadlock feels to me like the next biggest source of truly intractable
>trouble--and a source that is growing in importance every day, as
>distributed computation becomes the norm rather than the oddity.

Deadlock is an example of the scariest class of bug, the sporadically
occurring bug.  (Uninitialized variables are another example.)  Eliminating
bugs in this class probably has the greatest potential for reducing the
cost of building reliable software.

Cheers - Bill


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