Just for a moment, consider who this man is and what he has done. We would all do well to take a step back and consider his manner of response. Notice that he continued learning new languages after creating Erlang (instead of just evangelizing it at the one true language). He did not immediately say "choose these three languages" as if they were the only ones you could possibly learn. Does it really help our professi…
"I couldn't really learn Erlang, 'cos it didn't exist, so I invented it"
61–70 of 183 posts
Re: "I couldn't really learn Erlang, 'cos it didn't exist, so I invented it"
#62Re: "I couldn't really learn Erlang, 'cos it didn't exist, so I invented it"
#63>> The crazy think is we still are extremely bad at fitting things together - still the best way of fitting things together is the unix pipe Is that sad or pure genius?
I struggled with that point of his. From a coding speed perspective, he's right. But from an efficiency perspective, even some of the slowest interpreted languages will run circles around a shell script. However it's still an interesting and thought provoking point. It makes you wonder about other ways of plugging different objects / modules together.
Re: "I couldn't really learn Erlang, 'cos it didn't exist, so I invented it"
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Erlang mailing is a pleasure to read. Even as mix of different ages and experience levels (heck, Joe is a regular poster), the conversation is always civil. I read it every day along with hn and a few other blogs. http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/
Hmm... hn has been doing a very good job at convincing me to get my feet wet with erlang lately :)
If anything it helps think differently when facing problems. It makes you think about reliability, fault tolerance and concurrency in a new way. It is just as much a language as it is a new paradigm.
There some languages and toolkits started to copy some features from Erlang (Rust, Go, Scala's Akka, ...) they are all still pretty far from it in terms of providing the whole ecosystem (the full package).
Also Erlang has a great VM behind it (BEAM). It has a completely concurrent garbage collector and other nice things. That's why I am also excited about Elixir (I think there was a post here about that as well).
Re: "I couldn't really learn Erlang, 'cos it didn't exist, so I invented it"
#65To me, this list is great except for one small thing. - C - Prolog - Erlang - Smalltalk - Javascript - Hakell / ML /OCaml - LISP/Scheme/Clojure Javascript?! Over Ruby or Python or Lua? What is it with people liking Javascript. I really don't get it. What can I do that is so beautiful or mindbending that I can't do in python? From my experience there is only two reasons to learn Javascript: to be able to build web app…
Javascript is a very different language from Python. It is in some ways more flexible and less prescriptive. You point out one of the non-overlapping use cases. Javascript performance has seen really intensive efforts. Javascript has grown a rather nice async ecosystem that Python just doesn't have. It's also exciting for people from the standpoint that everything feels newer and more up for grabs. Python is a rather…
Python has Twisted, and it also has a radically better async ecosystem in gevent. Javascript's async story is far worse than Python's.
Re: "I couldn't really learn Erlang, 'cos it didn't exist, so I invented it"
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I struggled with that point of his. From a coding speed perspective, he's right. But from an efficiency perspective, even some of the slowest interpreted languages will run circles around a shell script. However it's still an interesting and thought provoking point. It makes you wonder about other ways of plugging different objects / modules together.
He doesn't mean literally the "|" in bash, he means the general concept.
He's talking about the concept of fitting things together and refers to Unix pipes (in fact the example he gave was literally a string of piped POSIX commands ready for dumping into $SHELL).
My point was that this concept doesn't scale well.
As a productivity tool, pipes are invaluable. But you wouldn't want to write a performance critical routine using them.
At the end of the day (and as Joe said himself), it's about picking the right tool for the job.
Re: "I couldn't really learn Erlang, 'cos it didn't exist, so I invented it"
#67Just for a moment, consider who this man is and what he has done. We would all do well to take a step back and consider his manner of response. Notice that he continued learning new languages after creating Erlang (instead of just evangelizing it at the one true language). He did not immediately say "choose these three languages" as if they were the only ones you could possibly learn. Does it really help our professi…
I thought this site was for the betterment of startup entrepreneurs, not hacking.
Re: "I couldn't really learn Erlang, 'cos it didn't exist, so I invented it"
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is it with people liking a specific language in general? Didn't you read the whole post? "Today there is an unhealthy concentration on language and efficiency and NOT on how things fit together and protocols - teach protocols and not languages." Exactly. Forget the language. Use it if it works for what you need to do. Learn to program correctly, learn how things fit together, how you can use languages together a…
> What is it with people liking a specific language What is it with shaming people for preferring a specific language where it is applicable? For some reason I can like a brand of electric drill, and I can believe in using a nailgun, but I am not allowed to like a specific language without someone coming along to scold me. If you don't ever develop opinions about tools and how to use them, are you really engaged or a…
When you buy a drill, the main purpose is to make holes in things. When you buy a nailgun, the main purpose is to stick things together. One might do it better, one might do it faster, and yes, it's useful to know those things. But you're still building a house, not an opinion about a drill or a nailgun.
Ever notice how professionals treat their tools, versus amateurs? Photographers are a great example. Amateur photographers are all about cameras and lenses and tools. They buy gear like there was no tomorrow, and they do very little actual photography. Some of them make it past this phase and change their focus to what photography is really about (light, subject, timing) but most don't.
Professional photographers buy cameras for one purpose: because they get the shot. They buy lenses for one purpose: because they get the shot. And they buy everything else they need for one purpose: because it gets the shot. Their focus is the photograph and everything else follows. Of course there is some thought of what lens is right for what job, and what camera works best for what needs, and durability and portability especially; but mostly they use what works because they know it well and it gets the shot. And some pros use the most ridiculous gear that you'd never expect because it works so well for their particular goals.
There was an article a while back about a Iraq war journalist who used only Olympus 6MP zoom cameras made 5-6 years ago because they were workhorses, extremely portable, and held up to desert conditions. Non-pros probably thought he was crazy and dumb, but he got the shots. He shipped. You have seen his photos in the news, guaranteed. Talking about that gear out of context, it would make zero sense. But for the situation, it was perfect, because he focused on the task and not the gear.
I'm not scolding anyone, I'm not criticizing a choice of language; I'm saying, focus on the right part of your task. The tool is important, but the task is more important. That's exactly what the original article was saying, too, if you'll kindly go back and take note.
Re: "I couldn't really learn Erlang, 'cos it didn't exist, so I invented it"
#69Just for a moment, consider who this man is and what he has done. We would all do well to take a step back and consider his manner of response. Notice that he continued learning new languages after creating Erlang (instead of just evangelizing it at the one true language). He did not immediately say "choose these three languages" as if they were the only ones you could possibly learn. Does it really help our professi…
The large point is, regarding langugage/framework bashing, people put in so much time into a particular language. You almost have to buy into it. I guess some people just become zealots.
Re: "I couldn't really learn Erlang, 'cos it didn't exist, so I invented it"
#70>> Things improved - I went to CERN and used the CRAY1 this could compile 100K lines of FORTRAN in 1 picosecond (ie about a zillion times slower than my mobile phone today) Sarcasm doesn't translate well in a thread like this, so just in case someone really thought it could compile 100K lines in a picosecond, dream on. :-)
Sarcasm would imply he was somehow denigrating or mocking CERN and/or the CRAY1 and I didn't get that vibe at all.