Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Erlang matters

petrohi.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 75 posts

Re: Why Erlang matters

#61

Post by rdtsc »

rartichoke wrote: post #20

Would it be safe to say Scala with the Akka lib offers the same robustness and distributed scalability as Erlang? Erlang is using the actor model and so is Akka. I really want to learn one or the other as a goto functional language. I keep looking at sites like Netflix, Twitter and Foursquare. Those seem to be sites running on either Java or Scala. Why would they pick that instead of Erlang?

> Would it be safe to say Scala with the Akka lib offers the same robustness and distributed scalability as Erlang?

Depends why you picked Erlang. Erlang has unsurpassed fault tolerance built in. This mean ability to crash and restart individual processes, ability to hot code reloading. Its standard library by default comes with such things as a distributed application controller that will make sure you application will immediately start running on another machine if it crashes locally.

I don't know of any other languages or platforms that provide that as a first class.

Then for things Erlang would be used you really would want something battle tested. Eventually Akka will be battle tested and this won't be an issue but I think it is not there yet.

Re: Why Erlang matters

#62

Post by petrohi »

z3phyr wrote: post #58

How does Erlang compare to Haskell?

Two most important differences that come to mind are 1) Erlang is dynamically typed language vs statically typed Haskell; 2) Haskell is functional language with lazy evaluation where side effects are the primary concern, Erlang has eager evaluation.

Re: Why Erlang matters

#63

Post by millerm »

I was just put on a new Erang/OTP project at work and will be working on it for the next 9 months or so. I'm currently on a "ramp up sprint" to get to learn the language, tools and libraries, then we will move on to development. I'm really enjoying the language. OTP is quite elegant and just awesome. Sure, there are a few annoying things in the language that I have already read about on the Net/here but, I can look past those paper cuts. I've been really diggin' Lisp (Clojure, Racket, CL and Scheme) and other functional languages and have been enjoying the concepts so much. I've really become enamored with functional languages and really don't want to write another lick of Java. I'll keep the Objective-C because I have to, you know why. I am not dissin' (crap, I used that word) Java. But, it is nice to be given the opportunity to think differently (damn, another unoriginal phrase).

Anyway, just giving a shout out to Erlang as I am finding the platform to be very interesting and that makes the day go by much better.

Re: Why Erlang matters

#65

Post by z3phyr »

petrohi wrote: post #62
z3phyr wrote: post #58

How does Erlang compare to Haskell?

Two most important differences that come to mind are 1) Erlang is dynamically typed language vs statically typed Haskell; 2) Haskell is functional language with lazy evaluation where side effects are the primary concern, Erlang has eager evaluation.

But, they are equally deployable in similar circumstances. Right?

Re: Why Erlang matters

#66

Post by petrohi »

dsiemon wrote: post #64

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2209269

Great article. I've been inaccurate in the blog saying that cache coherence will or should go away. What I mean is that ugly (non-scalable) effects of cache coherence as implemented by today's vendors can be relieved by Erlang VM to some degree. In the comment above [1] I say "It can also scale well if sniffing is not a broadcast". Your article is to the point by addressing exactly this issue with tracking of sharers.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4780706

Re: Why Erlang matters

#67

Post by Fixnum »

z3phyr wrote: post #58

How does Erlang compare to Haskell?

Until recently, Haskell didn't have an equivalent to Erlang's built-in support for distributed computing, but the new Cloud Haskell library (http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Cloud_Haskell) provides message-passing concurrency with a semantics very close to that of Erlang (but with more support for type-safety).

I'm not sure Cloud Haskell is ready to dethrone Erlang (and the OTP framework, and tooling for debugging distributed processes, and special VM features, ...) for high-reliability distributed computing today, but Haskell and its libraries are evolving with absurd speed and the Cloud Haskell ecosystem could certainly be competitive with Erlang in the near future. Haskell can certainly be used to write high-performance network applications (e.g., Mighttpd, Warp), so it's surely only a matter of time ...

Re: Why Erlang matters

#68

Post by petrohi »

millerm wrote: post #63

I was just put on a new Erang/OTP project at work and will be working on it for the next 9 months or so. I'm currently on a "ramp up sprint" to get to learn the language, tools and libraries, then we will move on to development. I'm really enjoying the language. OTP is quite elegant and just awesome. Sure, there are a few annoying things in the language that I have already read about on the Net/here but, I can look p…

Great to see more adoption for Erlang/OTP. The return on investment is clearly there for us at connect.me. We're implementing our backend and API in Erlang/OTP.

Can you share what type of application you will be working on?

Re: Why Erlang matters

#69

Post by z3phyr »

Fixnum wrote: post #67
z3phyr wrote: post #58

How does Erlang compare to Haskell?

Until recently, Haskell didn't have an equivalent to Erlang's built-in support for distributed computing, but the new Cloud Haskell library ( http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Cloud_Haskell ) provides message-passing concurrency with a semantics very close to that of Erlang (but with more support for type-safety). I'm not sure Cloud Haskell is ready to dethrone Erlang (and the OTP framework, and tooling for debuggin…

+1 to Cloud Haskell.

But, they should change its name so that it sounds like a library and not another language dilect. :)

Judging by its name, I thought that its a new haskell dilect ;)

Re: Why Erlang matters

#70

Post by rvirding »

petrohi wrote: post #56
rvirding wrote: post #54

Every time I read something about the weird Erlang syntax I get so tired and try and tell myself not to get into the discussion, it's not worth the effort, some people will never just never learn, etc. But sometimes I can't help myself. So some of my thoughts on this: - Syntax is the easiest part of learning a language. It's all written down and its just a RTFM. And yes, I have written a lot of C and lisp and prolog…

When semantics are very different and syntax tries to pretend they aren't to create false familiarity this will lead to some very painful brain-splits later on. I can assert from my own experience with alternating the use of = between Erlang and C++. Glad you liked the blog.

Yes, in retrospect using = was probably not a very good choice. I will admit some things in Erlang didn't receive much thought before being added while to some things we gave a lot thought; for example the language/systems basic properties and the semantics of concurrency, message passing and error handling.
Post reply on HN