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Erlang will replace Java in the next 2 years as the standard for Enterprise Applications

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Re: Erlang will replace Java in the next 2 years as the standard for Enterprise Applications

#11

Post by mdasen »

Enterprises move slowly. 2 years is no time in the enterprise world. How many Erlang programmers are there? I love learning new languages, but there are a lot of crusty programmers out there who refuse to update their skill set - and they're often entrenched in enterprise settings.

This next part will probably some change over time. Erlang is slower than Java - even with the HiPE JIT compiler. Erlang's performance is more akin to Python. Plus, as much as I protest, "enterprisey" people seem to have a love affair with static typing. They also have a love affair for nicely UML-diagrammed objects and Erlang is functional.

But the most important reason why this won't happen is that the majority of "enterprisey" systems I know of are a ton less reliable than consumer systems. "Enterprisey" has become the term I associate with needing to have a programmer on call for. This might sound stupid, but so many programmers I know worry about job security - mostly because they won't upgrade their skill set. Something that obsoletes the need for them to babysit applications eats at that security.

Erlang will get (more) popular. Lots love the functional paradigm. It's really well implemented, reliable, etc. It just won't displace Java quickly, if ever.

Re: Erlang will replace Java in the next 2 years as the standard for Enterprise Applications

#13

Post by ericb »

The 2 year aspect of the argument is a bit absurd. These changes just do not happen that fast, especially with sqillions of entrenched java developers in the enterprise.

He also argues that Erlang has "already penetrated the enterprise." Might seem that way if you work at Ericsson, but otherwise I can't imagine making this statement.

Re: Erlang will replace Java in the next 2 years as the standard for Enterprise Applications

#14

Post by hassy »

SwellJoe wrote: post #8
hassy wrote: post #6

No it won't (this coming from someone who loves Erlang and has worked full-time with it for a year). There has been way too much invested in both Java and conventional OOP for them to be displaced that fast. 2 years may be a long time in startup world, but in the enterprise world it's nothing. Ruby has been growing rapidly for the last 3 years, and it's still nowhere as popular as Java. And Ruby's marketing has been…

2 years may be a long time in startup world It's actually not a long time in the startup world, either. The average life cycle in the valley for VC-backed startups from founding to exit is 7 years. There are always exceptions, of course. But two years isn't enough time, in general, for anything interesting to shake out--either in languages or in startup companies.

What I meant is that it's possible that Erlang will become a popular choice for startups in the next two years.

Re: Erlang will replace Java in the next 2 years as the standard for Enterprise Applications

#15

Post by gaius »

yariv wrote: post #5
gaius wrote: post #2

No, it won't. OO has ruled the roost in the so-called Enterprise space for nigh-on 20 years now. Java hasn't (yet?) fully displaced C++ in 10 years despite, for this specific class of application, have several clear advantages. This is as much cultural as technological. Large corporations have a morbid (and self-fulfilling) paranoia about staff turnover and have adopted technologies such as OO because it is far easie…

The irony is that Erlang is so much easier than Java.

Shhh, don't tell anyone :-D

On a more serious note yes, but again that's a cultural thing. Languages like Erlang (and OCaml, and Haskell, and...), you spend more time thinking than typing. You don't (need to) write much code, and if you think of a better way you might completely overwrite yesterday's work. You might deliver a huge chunk of functionality in a couple of pages of code that took weeks of thought, but that looks like it was typed in a day (I have been in that situation). Functional languages don't fit big-company management comfortably. They don't look like "work" in the sense that most IT organizations are used to. Java will be with us for a long time.

Re: Erlang will replace Java in the next 2 years as the standard for Enterprise Applications

#16

Post by rcoder »

gaius wrote: post #2

No, it won't. OO has ruled the roost in the so-called Enterprise space for nigh-on 20 years now. Java hasn't (yet?) fully displaced C++ in 10 years despite, for this specific class of application, have several clear advantages. This is as much cultural as technological. Large corporations have a morbid (and self-fulfilling) paranoia about staff turnover and have adopted technologies such as OO because it is far easie…

The Java protection model is in many ways less strict than the process isolation model exploited in Erlang. Giving each programmer responsibility for their pool of classes may sound like a good way to limit their ability to damage the rest of the system, but as long as anyone else is dependent on the stability of their API (and the absence of unchecked runtime exceptions), a single bad line of code can easily bring down an entire system.

Also, while it may technically be a "functional" language by virtue of disallowing destructive update of values, it really reads more like a scripting language. Variables are dynamically typed, and the functions only have an arity, not a signature.

Programmers used to the expressive type systems and polymorphism of more "academic" functional languages like ML or Haskell, on the other hand, would probably chafe at Erlang's lack of support for any abstractions other than forking and message-passing.

Real rocket scientists, on the other hand, would probably like Erlang, since the semantics of the language are simple, and its fault-tolerance and concurrency features could be well-suited for high-availability systems like mission data collection. (Its lack of hard real-time features make it a non-starter for actual avionics.)

Re: Erlang will replace Java in the next 2 years as the standard for Enterprise Applications

#18

Post by SwellJoe »

hassy wrote: post #14
SwellJoe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 years may be a long time in startup world It's actually not a long time in the startup world, either. The average life cycle in the valley for VC-backed startups from founding to exit is 7 years. There are always exceptions, of course. But two years isn't enough time, in general, for anything interesting to shake out--either in languages or in startup companies.

What I meant is that it's possible that Erlang will become a popular choice for startups in the next two years.

I doubt that, as well. Ruby still isn't all that popular a choice for startups, and it's had some astoundingly good marketing. I'd say maybe 20% of the startups I know personally are using Ruby, with the rest divided amongst PHP, Python, Java, and Perl (not necessarily in that order, though PHP is definitely at the top of the list by a large margin). Since RoR started gaining traction about three years ago, and RoR is still not the leading platform, the notion that Erlang could even become a contender (much less the leader) in two years is more than a little ridiculous.

Not to mention the fact that there's only one language at this point that is inevitably going to grow really rapidly in popularity (JavaScript). (Others will grow, but none so fast as JavaScript.)

Re: Erlang will replace Java in the next 2 years as the standard for Enterprise Applications

#19

Post by anamax »

gaius wrote: post #15
yariv wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that Erlang is so much easier than Java.

Shhh, don't tell anyone :-D On a more serious note yes, but again that's a cultural thing. Languages like Erlang (and OCaml, and Haskell, and...), you spend more time thinking than typing. You don't (need to) write much code, and if you think of a better way you might completely overwrite yesterday's work. You might deliver a huge chunk of functionality in a couple of pages of code that took weeks of thought, but tha…

That's nice, but how easy is it to understand those 2 pages of brilliance later and how brittle are they?

Remember - the author is the smartest person who will ever see a given piece of code. The reader, even if it's the same person, will be dumber.

Programming isn't literature or poetry. No one ever had to add a mail reader to"Ode to a Grecian Urn".

Re: Erlang will replace Java in the next 2 years as the standard for Enterprise Applications

#20

Post by yariv »

anamax wrote: post #19
gaius wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shhh, don't tell anyone :-D On a more serious note yes, but again that's a cultural thing. Languages like Erlang (and OCaml, and Haskell, and...), you spend more time thinking than typing. You don't (need to) write much code, and if you think of a better way you might completely overwrite yesterday's work. You might deliver a huge chunk of functionality in a couple of pages of code that took weeks of thought, but tha…

That's nice, but how easy is it to understand those 2 pages of brilliance later and how brittle are they? Remember - the author is the smartest person who will ever see a given piece of code. The reader, even if it's the same person, will be dumber. Programming isn't literature or poetry. No one ever had to add a mail reader to"Ode to a Grecian Urn".

I think it's a lot easier to understand what some code does if you don't have to read a lot of language imposed cruft that surrounds the actual 'meat' of the algorithm.

Erlang really is easier than Java -- both to read and to write. I think people too often confuse "different" with "difficult".

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