Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)

Post by ivanhoe » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 1:14 PM UTC

qsort wrote: post #2

Who exactly claims Erlang is dead? The referenced article is SEO-infected garbage that also claims Haskell and Perl are dead.

Post by holsee » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 1:17 PM UTC

anonyfox wrote: post #10

I 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.

Post by capableweb » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 1:23 PM UTC

medo-bear wrote: post #9

bsder wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Post by holsee » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 1:31 PM UTC

loftsy wrote: post #38

I've written some Erlang and found the syntax awkward. One example of this is that variables can only be bound once. This means you end up writing: Val = SomeFunc() Val1 = Func2(Val) Val2 = Func3(Val1) Yes I know you can use the functional style to minimise having to do this but you still end up seeing this pattern in real code. Kubernetes has done a good job of replacing OTP. That said I think Erlang is still an int…

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      fun(Function, Acc) ->
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      end,
      Initial,
      Functions
    ),
  Initial = SomeFunc(),
  Pipeline = [Func0, Func1, Func2, Func3],
  Result = Pipeline(Pipeline, Initial).

Post by lelanthran » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 1:35 PM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #65

lelanthran wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I made a blog post around this very idea, that new languages never get the adoption that they need, because existing languages simply incorporate the best ideas from the new languages. At which point, why will anyone change the the new…

Those languages tend to die relatively quickly (zoomed out on a timescale, obviously), languages like CoffeeScript. When it first appeared, it was a god-send, but the good ideas were integrated into the core language, and itself went on to "die". But then you have languages that have features that you cannot replicate to other languages. You might be able to add arrow functions from CoffeeScript to JavaScript, but yo…