I wrote this to a couple of people on a private mailing list I am on:"OO has never lived up to the potential for me, for precisely thereason that most 'OO type' work I do (mostly via web apps) all tends to look likeprocedural applications just with OO constructs around it. Get rid ofthe OO constructs, and you pretty much got the same program, justwithout the OO overhead. So why should I bother with OO? This is oneof the motivations that led me to functional programming. All the goodpractices that is present OO still stand (like hiding implementationfrom interface, the use of opaque values (related with the first one),polymorphic functions), but it just doesn't think it is necessary tobind data and bahavior together. Higher-order functions seem, rightnow, to make sense more, for reusability purposes now than throughinheritance (ask my opinion on it after I developed some non-trivialstuff with functional languages :))"I worked in Rails and I played with Python a lot in these areas. My belief stems from this change in perspective:Objects in Python are glorified dictionaries, or dictionaries with OO logic. If inheritance is necessary, then the OO logic is useful. But, eh ... I don't use inheritance. At most, I use tables to inherit similarities, using joins to accomplish that type of goal. I don't know what other people do, but I never used inheritance in such a grand way to actually see a use for it.So, looking at something like ErlyDB, and its simple use of tuples, confirmed my point. I just got lazy a little.The question is: is there anything special when it comes to merging data and functions together. For what I do, I just can't see it.I said in the first tutorial that ErlyWeb (+ erlhive, but I haven't had a chance to look at that yet) is a Rails killer. Let me elaborate on that. It might not be flush with so many features as Rails does, but the constructs are much more simpler in ErlyWeb. The thing is that ErlyWeb is not this big opaque library of magic tricks; it doesn't need to be, no matter how many "opinions" are shoved into it.But I think this pretty much reflects not so much the capabilties of a language, but the opinion of the language community. Where Rails says "you are stuck with the whole methodology that Rails has to offer", ErlyWeb should say "here is a few interesting tools to get you moving - other than that, everything is pretty much intuitive after that" This is why I think it could draw people to Erlang. I like that.