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Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market

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Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market

#31

Post by res0nat0r »

headhasthoughts wrote: post #22
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 think this comment actually unintentionally is reinforcing his point.

Other programming languages than Erlang exist for a reason, they're not just fun toy languages for low IQ folks. There are tons of reasons why Erlang may not be a good fit for some project, and one of these other lesser languages would be a better fit, and he doesn't want to work with people who wouldn't even consider something like that.

Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market

#32

Post by edfletcher_t137 »

ethanwillis wrote: post #5
weatherlight wrote: post #4

> screw Elixir by the way Not the attitude I'd be hiring for honestly.

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.

Having strong opinions is a great thing, expressing them in such a way is not. Especially if you expect to be taken seriously.

Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market

#35

Post by nivertech »

res0nat0r wrote: post #31
headhasthoughts wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 think this comment actually unintentionally is reinforcing his point. Other programming languages than Erlang exist for a reason, they're not just fun toy languages for low IQ folks. There are tons of reasons why Erlang may not be a good fit for some project, and one of these other lesser languages would be a better fit, and he doesn't want to work with people who wouldn't even consider something like that.

Two possibilities here:

1. either the person who asked this question doesn't understand that most of the utility in this ecosystem comes from the BEAM VM, the OTP, and the community around them, not just from the Erlang-the-programming-language.

2. or he/she employs the sunk cost fallacy here: I already invested time into learning Erlang and its Prolog-inspired syntax, so "screw Elixir". Disclaimer: I mistakenly avoided learning Elixir for this reason, simply because I already had lots of Erlang/OTP code already written over the years.

Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market

#36

Post by conradfr »

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…

There's definitely "just Elixir" applications, I've worked on more than one. And I don't think any of my colleagues really knew Erlang.

(I don't consider using :timer or :crypto as having Erlang code)

But mostly that's more because it has been unnecessary rather than a dab at the language.

Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market

#38

Post by throwaway81523 »

anonymousDan wrote: post #24
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?

I don't think latency and jitter are big issues. If you're imagining VOIP packets flowing through the Erlang app, it's more likely that they are routed by hardware at a lower level. The Erlang app controls the lower level switches. I don't know about Ericsson switches in particular, but I've worked on telecom stuff (not programmed in Erlang, unfortunately) and that's how it worked. The low level routing was done by FPGA's controlled by a C program. The C program could have been written in Erlang instead, and that would have made life a lot nicer for the programmers.

Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market

#39

Post by rcarmo »

ztion wrote: post #30
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.

Of course, they have a huge investment in it. But there are loads of new entrants to the space, and the skill set is very rare.

Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market

#40

Post by rcarmo »

anonymousDan wrote: post #24
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?

I said no such thing. Merely that there is a higher reliance on hardware features even if the workloads are virtualized - more so than on your vanilla K8s cluster in any other industry (except perhaps trading).
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