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Why Erlang matters

petrohi.me

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Re: Why Erlang matters

#41

Post by confluence »

klibertp wrote: post #40
confluence wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unix, Linux and Java just to name a few highly successful worse is better paradigms. List the number of multi-billion dollar Lisp startups - I can think of only one that comes close - ITA ($700 million), and that was bought out by a C++/Java shop, namely Google. Don't take my word for it, ask a famous Lisper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_Better

The lisper follows up his essay with another: http://dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf (this IS written by Richard Gabriel, only under pseudonym, look at your wiki article: "Gabriel later answered his earlier essay with one titled Worse Is Better Is Worse[3] under the pseudonym "Nickieben Bourbaki" (an allusion to Nicolas Bourbaki)." - last line of "Effects" section) which presents slightly different opinion :)…

Worse is a fuzzy term - let's define it. Worse in this case means things that can be used by many average people to do the things that they want without mental contortions and actually ship useful products to billions people.

Java does that. Linux does that. Windows does that. Lisp doesn't.

And note - your article wasn't written by the author - it was written by someone else.

Re: Why Erlang matters

#42

Post by ludicast »

rustc wrote: post #2

On a related note, has anyone tried Elixir[1], which is a Ruby-like language that runs on the Erlang VM. If so, what project was that? how was your experience? [1] http://elixir-lang.org/

Elixir is awesome, it's like Ruby and Clojure having sex on an Erlang waterbed. However it still is maturing at a quick clip so I haven't done any production work in it.

But since Jose Valim is probably my favorite developer alive, I have faith that Elixir will do for Erlang what Rails did for Ruby.

I know it sounds like I'm comparing Rails (a framework) to Elixir (a language), but what I am comparing is a way of bridging-in Joe/Jane Developer.

Re: Why Erlang matters

#43

Post by klibertp »

confluence wrote: post #41
klibertp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lisper follows up his essay with another: http://dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf (this IS written by Richard Gabriel, only under pseudonym, look at your wiki article: "Gabriel later answered his earlier essay with one titled Worse Is Better Is Worse[3] under the pseudonym "Nickieben Bourbaki" (an allusion to Nicolas Bourbaki)." - last line of "Effects" section) which presents slightly different opinion :)…

Worse is a fuzzy term - let's define it. Worse in this case means things that can be used by many average people to do the things that they want without mental contortions and actually ship useful products to billions people. Java does that. Linux does that. Windows does that. Lisp doesn't. And note - your article wasn't written by the author - it was written by someone else.

Ok, this is what I was asking at the beginning, writing the question: "In what sense?"

You're entitled to your own definition of words, in this case you defined "worse" (and this definition is very popular, too!) and it's ok. My perspective is different and so my definition is - I don't care about "average people" at all, I like very much "mental contortions" and I enjoy making more than shipping, and so "worse" for me means something different altogether.

I just wanted to what you meant by "worse", really. I won't agree with you here, but I understand and accept your opinion.

I edited my previous post in reply to your note at the end.

Re: Why Erlang matters

#44

Post by pdog »

dschiptsov wrote: post #15

It is not just "matters". It is a deeply-researched and well-engineered explicitly concurrent programming language by smart and passionate people. It is a very rare example of first-class project, compared to the common nonsense, like Java or, god forbid, NodeJS.) If it is not that popular (which is rather good) it is not a language's fault. It is due to inability to acquire and maintain an appropriate mindset. btw,…

In what way is Java not a first-class project? That "common nonsense" had some of the greatest minds in computing behind it.

Re: Why Erlang matters

#45

Post by mietek »

codewright wrote: post #29
klibertp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question is why is it not a language in widespread practical use? 1. It kind of is, I think RabbitMQ, CouchDB and Riak are doing ok, for example. 2. Both syntax and semantics are sufficiently different from "industry standard" to be a hurdle for majority of people... I'm being told. I don't understand this; the more different the language is the more interesting it seems to me and the more happy I am to learn i…

RabbitMQ has some pretty serious limitations related to it being implemented on Erlang that keep it pretty strictly in the realm of being a message queue rather than a generic queue. CouchDB is more C++ than Erlang these days, bad example. It hasn't been mostly Erlang for a really long time. Erlang basically only does the clustering behavior, which is something Zookeeper et al. do already. Riak is the only solid exam…

> its known

Can you point to any references?

Re: Why Erlang matters

#46

Post by codewright »

calibraxis wrote: post #32
codewright wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RabbitMQ has some pretty serious limitations related to it being implemented on Erlang that keep it pretty strictly in the realm of being a message queue rather than a generic queue. CouchDB is more C++ than Erlang these days, bad example. It hasn't been mostly Erlang for a really long time. Erlang basically only does the clustering behavior, which is something Zookeeper et al. do already. Riak is the only solid exam…

> RabbitMQ has some pretty serious limitations related to it being implemented on Erlang that keep it pretty strictly in the realm of being a message queue rather than a generic queue. Interesting, where can I learn more about this claim? What are the incompatible facets of a generic queue and Erlang? What is an example of these generic queues (or if it's only an ideal, what are its characteristics)?

Just don't use it for big, long-lived work queues and you'll be fine.

If the queue gets badly backed up, you're probably fucked.

Larger, longer-lived work queues are really more of a Hadoop thing, not an in-memory queue thing.

Re: Why Erlang matters

#47

Post by derdesign »

shtylman wrote: post #28
dschiptsov wrote: post #15

It is not just "matters". It is a deeply-researched and well-engineered explicitly concurrent programming language by smart and passionate people. It is a very rare example of first-class project, compared to the common nonsense, like Java or, god forbid, NodeJS.) If it is not that popular (which is rather good) it is not a language's fault. It is due to inability to acquire and maintain an appropriate mindset. btw,…

This reminds me of a great quote. "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses" -stroustrup If you have to write about how your language matters, you have already missed the point. If it mattered, people would be using it.

I bet you or a friend of yours chats on facebook[1] or Watsapp[2]...

[1] http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/31/Eugene...

[2] http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/01/1-million-is-so-2...

Re: Why Erlang matters

#48

Post by confluence »

klibertp wrote: post #43
confluence wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse is a fuzzy term - let's define it. Worse in this case means things that can be used by many average people to do the things that they want without mental contortions and actually ship useful products to billions people. Java does that. Linux does that. Windows does that. Lisp doesn't. And note - your article wasn't written by the author - it was written by someone else.

Ok, this is what I was asking at the beginning, writing the question: "In what sense?" You're entitled to your own definition of words, in this case you defined "worse" (and this definition is very popular, too!) and it's ok. My perspective is different and so my definition is - I don't care about "average people" at all, I like very much "mental contortions" and I enjoy making more than shipping, and so "worse" for…

You'll notice that most successful systems empower the common man (or unit) (capitalism/democracy/distributed systems/self-policing/bottom up ideas) and the most "ivory tower"/"top down" like systems don't perform nearly as well (totalitarianism/communism).

There are limits of course, and always complexity, but distributed incentive based systems appear to empirically work rather well.

Re: Why Erlang matters

#49

Post by ericmoritz »

commentzorro wrote: post #3

Erlang's been fine for showing us what's good and what's bad. But most of all, Erlang allows us to take the good parts and move them to a "friendlier" language when the time comes.

Libraries like Akka http://akka.io/> or the Celluloid stack http://celluloid.io/> are nice and bring the good parts of OTP to more "friendlier" languages but you're still missing some fundamentals the Erlang VM which bring predictable performance such as distributed garbage collection.

Re: Why Erlang matters

#50

Post by philsnow »

codewright wrote: post #46
calibraxis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RabbitMQ has some pretty serious limitations related to it being implemented on Erlang that keep it pretty strictly in the realm of being a message queue rather than a generic queue. Interesting, where can I learn more about this claim? What are the incompatible facets of a generic queue and Erlang? What is an example of these generic queues (or if it's only an ideal, what are its characteristics)?

Just don't use it for big, long-lived work queues and you'll be fine. If the queue gets badly backed up, you're probably fucked. Larger, longer-lived work queues are really more of a Hadoop thing, not an in-memory queue thing.

> If the queue gets badly backed up, you're probably fucked.

Isn't that true of any queue ?

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