The hyperbole that Haskellers invoke around pure-functional vs impure is that you're never quite sure whether a function call you make will "fire the missiles".
It's colourful language, but it's just a stand-in for other properties you might care about. For instance, in head(sort(list)), will the whole list be sorted, or will the smallest element be returned? In atomically(doThis(); doThat()), will doThis be 100% reverted if doThat fails? If you stick to pure functions (and in the second example, STM) then you can unfire the missile!
AFAIK, Erlang just fires the missile "over there", not "over here". The author jumped from:
(X = X + 1) is bad
to
(mailbox = mailbox + message) is so simple!
I'm not bashing the BEAM, or the ease with which one can send messages (as an
Actor language), but I am complaining about the lack of tooling to write non-missile-firing functions on a single node (as a
Functional language).
It's colourful language, but it's just a stand-in for other properties you might care about. For instance, in head(sort(list)), will the whole list be sorted, or will the smallest element be returned? In atomically(doThis(); doThat()), will doThis be 100% reverted if doThat fails? If you stick to pure functions (and in the second example, STM) then you can unfire the missile!
AFAIK, Erlang just fires the missile "over there", not "over here". The author jumped from:
to I'm not bashing the BEAM, or the ease with which one can send messages (as an Actor language), but I am complaining about the lack of tooling to write non-missile-firing functions on a single node (as a Functional language).