Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Reia where scripting meets concurrency

Reia reminds me of that Reese's peanut butter cup commercial:

Hey, you got your Ruby/Python in my Erlang! Hey, you got your Erlang in my Ruby/Python!


And then there was this light that went off in someone's head - Why couldn't you bring the "stuff" people like about higher level languages down into something that, quite frankly just kicks ass, in Erlang?

To kick it off - and to quote the Reia wiki:
Reia (pronounced RAY-uh) is a Python/Ruby-like scripting language for the Erlang virtual machine (BEAM). Reia aims to expose all the features and functionality of Erlang in a language more familiar to programmers of scripting languages, while improving string handling, regular expressions, linking with external libraries, and other tasks which are generally considered outside the scope of Erlang. Reia is distributed under the MIT License.


Well, it's happening right now with Reia. I've been watching this project over my GitHub feed for maybe a month or so now and it's really cool seeing the leaps and bounds that Tony Arcieri is making with this little gem of a language. Granted, he still has a ways to go (and he openly admits this), I suggest giving it a try for fun() (that's my new favorite pun by the way).

Let me paste a few ideals from the Reia site to pique your interest a little more:
Concurrent programming is the future - very true, now if DB's would just catch up (oh, wait CouchDB!

You don't need an "everything is a..." language - he calls out SmallTalk and Ruby, but his argument is convincing, I think we've all been here before.

Don't build what you can steal - I really like that quote in regard to using a syntax of Python/Ruby and then laying it lovingly over the Erlang VM and OTP framework.

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