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Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market

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Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market

#21

Post by toast0 »

onebot wrote: post #13

This is the problem I have with Erlang developers. They only want to work on Erlang. Pragmatism be damned. It is never about the product or the company. It is only about which of the remaining 20 Erlang expert personalities in the world do they get to work alongside with. If there needs to be a special library, all other existing ones are garbage unless written by one of the 20 above, so they will just write their ow…

I'd count myself as an Erlang developer. But where I worked, we didn't hire many people who had used Erlang before; and I didn't either. It's a small language, and it doesn't take too long for someone who's done a couple languages before to be productive and/or dangerous in it. Yes, immutable is a change; yes, recursion instead of loops is a mindfuck; Yes, a smart person can figure it out and deal. Personally, I loved the promise of Elixir --- BEAM with syntax that's better than Erlang, but I was hoping for different syntax, so I'm out; but it's fine, it seems to be a gravity well drawing people into BEAM, which is a good thing, IMHO.

I'm not going to reach for libraries in Erlang, because mostly I've seen them not be there, and a lot of stuff is almost the same amount of code and fuss to use a library as to build the portion of the library that's actually needed in the moment. Any code that you bring in is code that you're running and responsible for, so it's got to be worth it. I've pulled in libraries that needed a lot of rewriting, and sometimes that's better than starting from scratch, and sometimes it's not. There's a fair amount of stuff out there where someone scratched their itch and left it as is; which is fine and thank you, but it might need a lot of help to be run in a production capacity.

I'm working a new job now and there's probably no Erlang in it. Which is sad, but I'll deal. That said, if I was working in Erlang and management said we had to switch, I would be out. It's one thing to work without the benefits of Erlang, it's another to be working with them and then have it taken away.

Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market

#22

Post by headhasthoughts »

onebot wrote: post #13

This is the problem I have with Erlang developers. They only want to work on Erlang. Pragmatism be damned. It is never about the product or the company. It is only about which of the remaining 20 Erlang expert personalities in the world do they get to work alongside with. If there needs to be a special library, all other existing ones are garbage unless written by one of the 20 above, so they will just write their ow…

"Yes, we are going to make your job six times less efficient and substantially more difficult, while simultaneously removing your main incentive for working here. No, you will not receive a raise or any other form of olive branch from us, management, in exchange for the fact that we have measurably reduced your quality of life. No, we are not negotiating this."

If any job I ever had did this, technical or otherwise, I'd leave too. Especially if you were going to rub salt in the wound and pick Go. It's akin to making someone mine coal with a rock instead of a machine.

Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market

#23

Post by ch4s3 »

psychphysic wrote: post #18
travisgriggs wrote: post #8

> screw Elixir by the way If OP is reading… care to elaborate in a more objective fashion? As an Elixir neophyte, one of the things that is a small frustration for me is that you’ll get to a problem and there just is no solution, and when you ask on the wonderful slack channel, someone will pipe up with a bit Erlang you use for that. It’d be like learning Japanese, and for sizeable pieces of your communication, your…

I learnt Erlang when it was still cool. And more recently (but not that recently) dabbled with learning Elixir. Most resources are targeting those who don't come from Erlang (mostly it was from rails). And my word are they being deceived. I don't think the Japanese/Latin analogy quite works it's like elixir is rhyming slang and Erlang is english. But everyone insists you can get by with rhyming slang alone. Errr. Nop…

I think a better analogy is Erlang being like Latin and Elixir being like Portuguese or Spanish.

But I digress, you can learn how the BEAM and OTP work as an Elixir dev without being great at reading or writing Erlang code.

Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market

#24

Post by anonymousDan »

rcarmo wrote: post #12

The generalist view is that nobody is using Erlang for modern telco workloads anymore. (yes, there are exceptions. Bear with me) I learned Erlang when we were programming Ericsson voice switches some twenty years ago, and even though Nokia also adopted OTP and did some pretty amazing things with it (including a Hadoop analogue that used Erlang to coordinate Python workers across nodes), I have only come across Erlang…

Are you saying BEAM introduces too much latency and/or jitter for telco workloads? This surprises me. I would have thought that if anything BEAM should be pretty efficient for network I/O. Also what would be the causes of unacceptable jitter? The runtime itself is designed to avoid things like long gc pauses - is it that you end up having to migrate elixir processes between BEAM scheduler cores?

Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market

#26

Post by javajosh »

I really like Erlang as a language and OTP as an idea, but have never used it professionally. I'd assume that there exists a relatively close-knit community of practitioners in the world, similar to other "niche" languages like Clojure, so I would start there. It could be a mailing list, a website, a discord server...but I'm sure its out there.

Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market

#28

Post by nbap »

striking wrote: post #9
ethanwillis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd first ask them why they hold the opinion. You might be surprised by the reasoning they have for saying this. Having strong opinions isn't necessarily a bad thing.

There's a time and a place, though, no? "Screw Elixir" might be fine as an opinion on its own, but in the same breath as "I would like a job"?

Right? I could easily list a few companies hiring Erlang developers, including the one I currently work for but that attitude is a big no-no for me.

Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market

#30

Post by ztion »

rcarmo wrote: post #12

The generalist view is that nobody is using Erlang for modern telco workloads anymore. (yes, there are exceptions. Bear with me) I learned Erlang when we were programming Ericsson voice switches some twenty years ago, and even though Nokia also adopted OTP and did some pretty amazing things with it (including a Hadoop analogue that used Erlang to coordinate Python workers across nodes), I have only come across Erlang…

Ericsson is still using erlang for modern telecom workloads, they use it in packet core (SGSN-MME, AMF). With single nodes handling many millions of subscribers.
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