61–70 of 244 posts
Performance was focused solely on throughput, latency was terrible for anything requiring even modest computation. Finally dropped it after rewriting a naive Clojure implementation of something that ran 8x faster than the Erlang version.
Now the answers are a bit more useful, a bit more constructive:
* write more, better docs (Erlang for Java programmers, .. for JS devs, .. Ruby, etc)
* polish the websites, improve search rankings for helpful links (the standard library, etc)
* write at least one good O'Reilly book
* write lots of libraries, especially web frameworks
* integrate seamlessly with other platforms (possible with Clojure, maybe not Erlang)
* upload screencasts "15 Minutes in Erlang", etc
* ...use your imagination
Lisp is another prototypical "our language is awesome, why is it dying?". FreeBSD used to get joked on, too. Well la-dee-da, Erlang on FreeBSD can be a winning combination! These technologies will remain good, but they won't magically make themselves popular. It's not if-you-build-it-they-will-come anymore. There are too many programming languages to get acquainted with even 20% of them. Languages need to be more competitive to be more popular.
Like Clojure, I like that Erlang has lots of interesting ideas. I may never use either in production, but Erlang's OTP sounds very interesting as a way to handle real-world scenarios like failure handling. Similarly, Clojure's datomic, core async, etc. are interesting ideas, implemented by people with good taste. However, too many examples show trivial things like mapping over a list or calculating something recursiv…
I spent a total of about 11 months (spread over a few years) consulting on a betting exchange in erlang. It was pretty painful even with lots of erlang experience. I sat down one week and prototyped a rewrite of the core exchange in clojure. 40x better throughput and 10x better latency despite using only two threads, naive `pr-str` serialisation and storing all the exchange state in one huge immutable data structure…
I have "tried it & stopped". I only tried it to check out webmachine, which appears to the be only web framework in existence that is not stupid and terrible. I stopped because I was done trying webmachine, and went back to my normal language that is much nicer than erlang (haskell). I don't think my experience with erlang has anything to do with the reasons it isn't more popular though. The biggest thing I see is th…
Erlang belongs in this category of languages that have really cool features but which almost nobody has to learn to do a certain job. Nearly everything you can do with Erlang you can do with something else and there are a lot of languages that are necessary for one purpose or another and can't be replaced with Erlang. This is usually because said language is so entrenched in a space that it doesn't make sense to use anything else.
The end result is that programmers only have so much time and only so many projects that they can reasonably devote to their 'fun' language and there are a lot of those from which to choose. Erlang isn't competing with Java, it's competing with Lisp, Smalltalk, Factor, Haskell, OCaml, etc. That's a long list of competition.
I haven't looked at Erlang before, so I thought I give it a quick look. Google led me to the Erlang home page[1], which has "What is Erlang" (sounds good) and "What is OTP" (which doesn't bother to define what O, T, and P stand for.) Following the Erlang Quickstart [2] link, I get a page that doesn't really tell me anything about the language. It demonstrates a program that implements a factorial function, then tells…
It was actually designed to solve actual problems. Specifically, extremely high reliability in some of Ericsson's core networking gear.
I'd recommend Learn You Some Erlang[0] if you intend to look at it again. It explains the language, then OTP (the Open Telephony Platform - a framework for defining Erlang process trees and failure modes), then basic outside communication and disk storage.
Since you asked: I have never tried Erlang because I've heard it's like Haskell but harder to learn, and Haskell already breaks my feeble mind, so I have steered clear. This may or may not be an accurate picture, but it was my decision-making process. I have no programming problems that make me think learning a whole new language would be worth it (on top of my existng stack of 10 or so).
Have you tried learning Haskell with http://learnyouahaskell.com ? It always saddens me when people think their mind is too "feeble" for learning something, whatever it may be, because in most cases it isn't!
I haven't looked at Erlang before, so I thought I give it a quick look. Google led me to the Erlang home page[1], which has "What is Erlang" (sounds good) and "What is OTP" (which doesn't bother to define what O, T, and P stand for.) Following the Erlang Quickstart [2] link, I get a page that doesn't really tell me anything about the language. It demonstrates a program that implements a factorial function, then tells…
Come on. Not exactly a good faith effort, is it? Why type in a rant like this, when you could have found a wonderful tutorial on Google in one tenth of the time it took you to write this?
Honestly, I think what kills it is that it's not an Algol-descended language [1]. If Erlang was written with an Algol-esque syntax it would have taken off years ago. But instead it has this weird syntax, which it then doesn't really do that much with. What do I mean by that? Haskell has a radically different syntax, but it does things with that syntax and its pervasive currying to enable a powerful succinctness that…
Not knowing enough about Erlang/OTP or Go: Would it be possible for more of OTP to be replicated in a Go 2.0? What's missing? What would it take? What can never be replicated?