Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)
efinancialcareers.com
Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)
1–10 of 155 posts
Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)
#2Who exactly claims Erlang is dead? The referenced article is SEO-infected garbage that also claims Haskell and Perl are dead.
Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)
#3Erlang is designed to accommodate principles for building reliable systems in the presence of software errors, and in such capacity it is definitely a worthy instrument. It is one of the few concurrency oriented programming languages in the world.
But as Joe Armstrong himself pointed out in his dissertation: "indeed concurrent programs can be written in languages which are not themselves concurrent". You can write concurrent programs in Python if you want. Or even shell. As soon as you can spawn a process and send it a message - you're good.
And this explains why Erlang hasn't conquered the world. As soon as it has established the principles, as soon as it proved them feasible in practice, it has made itself redundant. The lessons we learned from Erlang were larger than Erlang itself.
Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)
#4Who exactly claims Erlang is dead? The referenced article is SEO-infected garbage that also claims Haskell and Perl are dead.
Well, it's 21 century, nothing dies anymore but people. But you have to admit that it's not booming the way it deserves. I wrote in Erlang a decade ago and I thought that in ten years, surely, it will eat the world. Erlang got too many things right.
However, as people from other domains started employing its principles, Erlang's value diminished. E. g., if we now write supervisors in Python that run servers, event handlers and FSMs written in C++, and the system works fine, we don't really need Erlang.
Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)
#5We didn't forget it.
We burned it with fire, and then buried it.
Most of us still of nightmares of it.
Some didn't survive. :(
Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)
#6Erlang is designed to accommodate principles for building reliable systems in the presence of software errors, and in such capacity it is definitely a worthy instrument. It is one of the few concurrency oriented programming languages in the world. But as Joe Armstrong himself pointed out in his dissertation: "indeed concurrent programs can be written in languages which are not themselves concurrent". You can write co…
I strongly disagree that we learned much of anything.
For example: hot upgrading. The fact that an Erlang process can tail call itself means that you can swap in a new process with the same signature at the tail call of the old process. Nobody else does this that I know of.
I can go on further. The whole set of behaviors encoded by the OTP libraries is also something that nobody else seems to do. Erlang's bit syntax is possibly the best out there even today.
I guess pattern matching finally made it to other languages. I would think that's probably about it from Erlang (pattern matching isn't exclusive to Erlang but it was one of the earlier languages with it).
None of the other programming languages seem to have learned much of anything from Erlang--and that's kind of sad.
Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)
#7Who exactly claims Erlang is dead? The referenced article is SEO-infected garbage that also claims Haskell and Perl are dead.
It's only a word but the very fact the article refers to Erlang as a "coding language" and not a "programming language" is enough to give it a cheap, amateurish feel from the start IMHO.
I'd just ignore it as low quality click bait if I were you.
Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)
#8Erlang is designed to accommodate principles for building reliable systems in the presence of software errors, and in such capacity it is definitely a worthy instrument. It is one of the few concurrency oriented programming languages in the world. But as Joe Armstrong himself pointed out in his dissertation: "indeed concurrent programs can be written in languages which are not themselves concurrent". You can write co…
I strongly disagree that we learned much of anything. For example: hot upgrading. The fact that an Erlang process can tail call itself means that you can swap in a new process with the same signature at the tail call of the old process. Nobody else does this that I know of. I can go on further. The whole set of behaviors encoded by the OTP libraries is also something that nobody else seems to do. Erlang's bit syntax…
Erlang was originally either implemented in Prolog or was even a library / extension for Prolog, and its pattern matching functionality is just "because it was all Prolog and the developers were using Prolog", so it isn't really fair to give Erlang any credit at all for that as it wasn't even independently designed.
Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)
#9Erlang is designed to accommodate principles for building reliable systems in the presence of software errors, and in such capacity it is definitely a worthy instrument. It is one of the few concurrency oriented programming languages in the world. But as Joe Armstrong himself pointed out in his dissertation: "indeed concurrent programs can be written in languages which are not themselves concurrent". You can write co…
I strongly disagree that we learned much of anything. For example: hot upgrading. The fact that an Erlang process can tail call itself means that you can swap in a new process with the same signature at the tail call of the old process. Nobody else does this that I know of. I can go on further. The whole set of behaviors encoded by the OTP libraries is also something that nobody else seems to do. Erlang's bit syntax…
> For example: hot upgrading. The fact that an Erlang process can tail call itself means that you can swap in a new process with the same signature at the tail call of the old process. Nobody else does this that I know of
common lisp is in a league of its own when it comes to hot reloading and debugging
Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)
#10I really love Elixir (and somewhat Erlang) and all the mental models and how developing in the ecosystem feels like, especially with phoenix/liveview.
Having said that, nowadays anything that can't really run on AWS Lambda is a nonstarter in any company tech discussions, no matter how cool/productive it is. The operational benefits of serverless are simply too great especially when trying to scale up.