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Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)

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Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)

#81

Post by aynyc »

Erlang isn't dying but not many people care for it in capital market. Looks at the traits of Erlang, it's designed for telecom environment which is almost opposite of capital market.

1. Fault tolerance is almost all hardware driven. Capital market participants spent billions of dollar building reliable private networks.

2. Distributed in trading doesn't mean what FAANG are doing. Trading systems for example usually run 2 hot-warm systems with real-time replication commits, that's about it. They don't run horizontally scaled systems because network time would kill their performance.

In my experience, I haven't heard anyone asking for hot swap code and high availability (outside of trading hours).

Are there shops out there that run Erlang? Sure, but most companies don't care about Erlang simply because its value isn't better than Java/C/C++.

Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)

#82

Post by college_physics »

Finance means different things to different people. Are we talking about trading "finance" (including high frequency trading), investment banking "spreadsheet" finance, consumer or corporate "database" finance or maybe even (the horror, the horror) "defi" cryptofinance?

What is true is that finance in almost all its guises is a world apart in terms of information technology. Closed and proprietary, ultra expensive and arcane, highly regulated etc., it is an information technology branch that evolved separately and it shows.

Whether that will remain so is an interesting question. So called "fintech" has been a thing for a while. E.g. whatsapp is famously built on erlang, so if Meta wants to turn it into a super-app (the "Asian way") you will have a de-facto application in "consumer" mobile/payments finance.

Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)

#83

Post by adenozine »

brightball wrote: post #50
haspok wrote: post #35

Maybe the title would have been better like this: "PROLOG: The coding language that finance forgot." Erlang (the language) is rooted in Prolog, and many of its best traits can be traced back to this fact. That everything is a pattern, and you can pattern match pretty much anything is rarely found in other languages, for example. Elixir made a mistake in my opinion when it went with a Ruby-like syntax. Also, there are…

Elixirs syntax is only Ruby like in that it’s very readable IMO. Any similarity with Ruby stops there.

Well sure but you could be more clear.

Block parameters, implicit parentheses for certain method/function calls, uppercase significance, symbolic significance for brackets.

Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)

#84

Post by adenozine »

haspok wrote: post #35

Maybe the title would have been better like this: "PROLOG: The coding language that finance forgot." Erlang (the language) is rooted in Prolog, and many of its best traits can be traced back to this fact. That everything is a pattern, and you can pattern match pretty much anything is rarely found in other languages, for example. Elixir made a mistake in my opinion when it went with a Ruby-like syntax. Also, there are…

Have you seen gleam.run? It’s pretty neat.

I preferred the alpha syntax, which was ML-inspired, but it’s decent in its current incarnation.

I’ve always though the beam was really nice for building programming languages, and clearly that is true, as there are now more than a dozen targeting it.

Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)

#85

Post by andsoitis »

frou_dh wrote: post #52
glenngillen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Originally “Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine”, but then the subsequent maintainer was named Björn so you could sub that in too.

IIRC Joe Armstrong said he was puzzled why people latched on to the term "BEAM" so much, and he preferred that it was simply referred to as the Erlang VM.

Beam, with one syllable, is more convenient to say out loud than Erlang VM. It also sounds cooler.

Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)

#87

Post by rvirding »

haspok wrote: post #35

Maybe the title would have been better like this: "PROLOG: The coding language that finance forgot." Erlang (the language) is rooted in Prolog, and many of its best traits can be traced back to this fact. That everything is a pattern, and you can pattern match pretty much anything is rarely found in other languages, for example. Elixir made a mistake in my opinion when it went with a Ruby-like syntax. Also, there are…

I think the thing to remember that it all started as an interpreter written in Prolog in which we could develop our ideas on what the real problem was and the right semantics of a system for solving them. As we went along our "language" evolved as well and became less and less Prolog and more functional as we removed much Prolog semantics, added functional "stuff" and developed the final syntax.

We had along the way also looked at concurrent logic languages. So by the time we had a language and design rules how to use it most of Prolog had disappeared, though some of its syntax still remained. This language was, of course, Erlang.

While Prolog was a nice base on which to develop our ideas it was never the language we would have used in real life.

Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)

#89

Post by djtango »

college_physics wrote: post #82

Finance means different things to different people. Are we talking about trading "finance" (including high frequency trading), investment banking "spreadsheet" finance, consumer or corporate "database" finance or maybe even (the horror, the horror) "defi" cryptofinance? What is true is that finance in almost all its guises is a world apart in terms of information technology. Closed and proprietary, ultra expensive an…

Wasn't WeChat built in Erlang as well?

Re: Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot (2022)

#90

Post by innocentoldguy »

haspok wrote: post #35

Maybe the title would have been better like this: "PROLOG: The coding language that finance forgot." Erlang (the language) is rooted in Prolog, and many of its best traits can be traced back to this fact. That everything is a pattern, and you can pattern match pretty much anything is rarely found in other languages, for example. Elixir made a mistake in my opinion when it went with a Ruby-like syntax. Also, there are…

I think Elixir's Ruby-like syntax is one of the many things that make it great.

Comparing the two, I think Prolog may be easier for handling databases (I like Ecto, but it can be a little complex to set up and get right). Both Elixir and Prolog handle pattern-matching, but I think Elixir's syntax is nicer to work with. Of course, this is subjective. Both are great at handling list data. IO is consistently easy with Elixir whereas it can be difficult at times with Prolog.

Elixir and Erlang allow you to create supervision trees which can watch code and automatically and quickly recover from unexpected errors. Prolog's error handling and recovery can be slow. The overheard of calling a goal through catch/3, for instance, is quite significant compared to Elixir/Erlang.

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