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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)

#91

Post by jonhohle »

aynyc wrote: post #81

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 r…

Funny anecdote about one of the FAANGs: before the idea of service meshes and Consul and Envoy a similar idea was being rolled out to transparently proxy, encrypt, and authenticate traffic between services. The initial implementation was on erlang and didn’t cause any operational issues for our team, from what I remember. The project was moved to another team who decided for version 2 to rewrite in Java (high made sense from an integration perspective).

Unfortunately, they hadn’t tested at scale along with whatever it was servicing and as it was being rolled out it quickly ballooned in memory causing systems to swap and fall over. They eventually got it working, but the rollout was less than ideal and unfortunately an erlang project that affected a significant amount of traffic without notice was deprecated.

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

#92

Post by crymer11 »

rvirding wrote: post #87
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…

It’s really delightful that we’re able to get the thoughts of someone who was there and involved in the genesis of the language.

Thank you for all the time you’ve taken to explain the “why” of Erlang!

(For those unfamiliar, go check out “The Erlang Rationale” and some of rvirding’s posts elsewhere, e.g., on the thread at https://elixirforum.com/t/the-erlang-rationale-by-robert-vir...)

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

#93

Post by jelkand »

djtango wrote: post #88

I heard on the grapevine once that Goldman Sachs have a proprietary distributed database built in Erlang. Can neither substantiate nor deny but did make me wonder about all the hidden proprietary tech out in the world...

Most of the hidden proprietary tech at Goldman Sachs was built in the early 90s, so a bit less sexy than Erlang. Impressive in its own right though.

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

#94

Post by innocentoldguy »

aynyc wrote: post #81

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 r…

The company I currently work for switched from Java to Elixir/Erlang because developer productivity was so much higher. Being able to turn around features and fixes in a fraction of the time has been quite valuable for us.

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

#95

Post by capableweb »

stevan wrote: post #79
capableweb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question is if Common Lisp got the idea from Erlang, or vice-versa. Common Lisp first appeared in 1984 while Erlang appeared in 1986. If so, the original point of "None of the other programming languages seem to have learned much of anything from Erlang" might remain accurate.

In the 70s Ericsson programmed their telephone switches in a proprietary language called PLEX. It had hot code swapping, so when Joe Armstrong started working on Erlang to replace PLEX in the 80s this was a requirement. Dropping a few thousands of calls just to do an update simply wasn't an option.

On the other hand, even the first versions of lisps (as far as I can gather at least) had `eval`, meaning a running program could accept external output and update itself. And this was in the 60s.

The question remains :)

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

#96

Post by Terretta »

djtango wrote: post #88

I heard on the grapevine once that Goldman Sachs have a proprietary distributed database built in Erlang. Can neither substantiate nor deny but did make me wonder about all the hidden proprietary tech out in the world...

> heard on the grapevine once that Goldman Sachs have a proprietary distributed database built in Erlang

From the article, third paragraph:

Goldman Sachs built its messaging system using RabbitMQ, which runs on Erlang, in 2018. Jonathan Skrzypek (who now works for Coinbase) was running the messaging engineering team at Goldman at the time. The system had to be fault-free because the messages it was transmitting could "worth a couple million dollars," said Skrzypek. RabbitMQ was chosen because of its resilience and "reliable delivery, guaranteed delivery."

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

#97

Post by weatherlight »

jonhohle wrote: post #91
aynyc wrote: post #81

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 r…

Funny anecdote about one of the FAANGs: before the idea of service meshes and Consul and Envoy a similar idea was being rolled out to transparently proxy, encrypt, and authenticate traffic between services. The initial implementation was on erlang and didn’t cause any operational issues for our team, from what I remember. The project was moved to another team who decided for version 2 to rewrite in Java (high made se…

Everyone always talks/jokes about, "Rewrite it in Rust," think about all the business applications over the years that had been rewritten to Java, just because. Usually under the guise of, "Kids coming out of college will have an easier time wrapping their heads around Java," than some other lang.

In my time as an engineer, I've seen quite a few Scala and Clojure apps, get rewritten in this manner.

This is all antidotal, of course.

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

#98

Post by sclarisse »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #56
sclarisse wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having seen actual sprawling Java codebases at banks and elsewhere, they tend to end up sprawling as they deal with (a) some specific old computer, or (b) the complexity of some dumb framework in the language itself. The business logic only approaches that level when you’re dealing with specific products are treated for things like taxes and customs, or, medical billing codes.

Banks are not the entirety of finance, but having worked on some finance backends I agree with the comment you're responding to. Finance code is legacy by default because the policies it's modeling are political and regulatory, and subject to quick changes and reversals. Often the law as written is ambiguous and your implementation is based on interpretation of a specific regulatory body, or even a single auditor, wh…

I mean, on some level, yes, but if all of the complexity people wrote with Java was merely collections of versioned strategy-patterns with average-level organization, it wouldn’t be sufficient for the language to have the AbstractEnterpriseBeanProviderFactoryFactory reputation that it does today.

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

#99

Post by hestefisk »

ivanhoe wrote: post #62
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.

Erlang and Haskell were never really the mainstream so not much changed for them, but Perl was "the language" at one point in time. It was everywhere, and now it's basically in the same box as Cobol - people who use it are 99% maintaining some old script. Very few young people choose to learn it nowadays, and the development got super slow due to the lack of developers. Perl 7 sounded great on paper, but I doubt it w…

use Perl;

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

#100

Post by jamal-kumar »

The real eureka moment for me getting why erlang and elixir are game changing was realizing how easy it is to build distributed applications using them, especially in Elixir the facility of this is just incredible. The OTP (Open Telecom Platform) as it's called is probably its coolest feature in my eyes.

https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/mix-otp/introduction...

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