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

Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 244 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

#101

Post by yogo »

asattarmd wrote: post #91
DougWebb wrote: post #33

I haven't looked at Erlang before, so I thought I give it a quick look. Google led me to the Erlang home page[1], which has "What is Erlang" (sounds good) and "What is OTP" (which doesn't bother to define what O, T, and P stand for.) Following the Erlang Quickstart [2] link, I get a page that doesn't really tell me anything about the language. It demonstrates a program that implements a factorial function, then tells…

Ffs, you're not looking at some small product that an unknown company built. You're looking at something that is really well-known. What does the website of Google convey? Do you really decide whether you'd learn a language by looking at its website? > "that the online reference doesn't cover interaction with anything outside of your program" This does NOT mean it does not teach you IO. The full bullet point is > "Ho…

> Do you really decide whether you'd learn a language by looking at its website?

I certainly could see myself doing that. It's usually indicative of the leadership and community that's associated with the language. In Erlang's case I understand that it's pretty niche in the big scheme of things, and that might be the reason. In terms of languages if the information presented isn't on the level of Java, PHP, Ruby, Python and others it comes off as sub-par. That may not be the reality but it's the perception IMO.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

#102

Post by davidw »

timje1 wrote: post #52
jaimebuelta wrote: post #36

Erlang is a very specialised language. It does one thing well (scalability) at the expense of not really being a general purpose language. The syntax is just weird, not only in a paradigm-way (pattern matching is not huge in most languages, but, hey, that's the way of doing stuff in functional programming), but on strange places ("read" lines ending on dot, semicolon takes time, it does not share any common syntax de…

This. It's amazing and powerful if you need 1m+ client connections per server. Outside of the epic scale engineering problems of facebook, twitter, google, amazon, whatsapp... It's very difficult to get anything done with Erlang. If you have fewer than a million people using your application at a time, you're probably better off writing it in a more normal language.

That's the hype, but if you ask the people who built it, it's actually more about fault tolerance than scaling. And indeed, I'm using it for a semi-embedded system where stability is important, something that Go and Node.js, for instance, didn't seem quite ready for when we evaluated them a year ago. Erlang is pretty rock solid and is something that we'll be happy to have running without worries.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

#103

Post by gordonguthrie »

Luc wrote: post #92
gordonguthrie wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's doing this in good faith because I, the original poster, asked him too. This is the best answer on the page (for me).

But this doesn't tell you anything, other than that someone who's not interested and pressed for time won't put any effort into it. It's a trivial result.

It tells you that the primary route to finding out about Erlang for someone who knots nothing about it (ie Google it and have a nosey) its no bloody good.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

#104

Post by waffle_ss »

jerf wrote: post #95
waffle_ss wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides the issues that jerf mentioned, Erlang also has per-process garbage collection built right into the VM. Last time I checked Go's garbage collection was still stop-the-world, mark-and-sweep, making it less suitable for soft real-time systems than Erlang.

"Go 2.0" probably can't ever quite fix that, but there's some potential for improvement; one can imagine as an optimization the compiler being able to determine a particular goroutine really is isolated (no shared state with anything else at start time, communicates only via channels that are full copiers of state, etc.) and independently GC's them, and also excludes them from the "stop" in the "stop the world". But…

Yeah I don't doubt there are some smart people out there that could make something like that happen (look at Azul and their pauseless GC for the JVM for example). However, it will be a tough fix when compared to the simple/pure approach Erlang takes.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

#105

Post by vq »

redthrowaway wrote: post #39

Fun fact: I did a co-op at Ericsson in second year. I asked my interviewer (later boss) if they used Erlang at all, and she'd never heard of it. Some of the hackers in the company had a limited degree of familiarity with it, but none of the PMs/managers seemed to know what it was.

It was even banned internally for a couple of years and Armstrong left Ericsson as a result.

I know it gets some use within Ericsson for running quickcheck tests against C-code.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

#106

Post by doktrin »

asattarmd wrote: post #91
DougWebb wrote: post #33

I haven't looked at Erlang before, so I thought I give it a quick look. Google led me to the Erlang home page[1], which has "What is Erlang" (sounds good) and "What is OTP" (which doesn't bother to define what O, T, and P stand for.) Following the Erlang Quickstart [2] link, I get a page that doesn't really tell me anything about the language. It demonstrates a program that implements a factorial function, then tells…

Ffs, you're not looking at some small product that an unknown company built. You're looking at something that is really well-known. What does the website of Google convey? Do you really decide whether you'd learn a language by looking at its website? > "that the online reference doesn't cover interaction with anything outside of your program" This does NOT mean it does not teach you IO. The full bullet point is > "Ho…

> You're looking at something that is really well-known. What does the website of Google convey?

The Google comparison is comical. You are wildly over-estimating how well known Erlang is, even in the dev community.

> Do you really decide whether you'd learn a language by looking at its website?

Most devs learn a new language when it helps them solve a problem. Anyone who needs to solve the problems that Erlang addresses has already at least looked at Erlang.

This thread was also directed at those who have never used Erlang. Starting with the Erlang website makes eminent sense.

Specific example :

Compare the Erland and Rust websites. I've never used Rust or Erlang. I can confidently say that the Rust website does a better job of familiarizing a new user with the language. It's not just a matter of the Rust syntax being C-derived, either. It's simply harder to find any useful information on the Erlang website.

Rust :

    * code sample on landing page  
    * comprehensive tutorial linked directly from landing page
Erlang :

    * no code on landing page  
    * "quick start guide" which is basically a link to a non-free book 
    * Getting to actual code requires 3-4 clicks from the landing page
    * e.g. Documentation -> Course -> Sequential Programming
Conclusion : The Erlang website isn't as useful as that of at least 1 other non-mainstream language.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

#107

Post by vertex-four »

nousernamesleft wrote: post #89
vertex-four wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This idea that you need to be a compsci phd or something to use haskell is simply not reality. The fact that there is so much maths talk surrounding Haskell really doesn't help. And I've watched many, many discussions about Haskell go into deep arguments about category theory. I want to write a program, not write a computer science paper.

>The fact that there is so much maths talk surrounding Haskell really doesn't help Nor does it hurt. It only provides something for people to point to while they say "look, people are talking about something I am not interested in, therefore haskell is too hard and I shouldn't bother trying". >And I've watched many, many discussions about Haskell go into deep arguments about category theory You are not required to pa…

> So do it?

A huge part of a programming language is, in fact, its community. I'd say that's more important than the language itself; any given feature can and will be replicated, but the community cannot be.

I cannot get the maximum out of Haskell if I cannot get involved in its community, which is heavily CS-oriented.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

#108

Post by pdabbadabba »

Luc wrote: post #92
gordonguthrie wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's doing this in good faith because I, the original poster, asked him too. This is the best answer on the page (for me).

But this doesn't tell you anything, other than that someone who's not interested and pressed for time won't put any effort into it. It's a trivial result.

Well, if the question is "Why isn't Erlang more popular?" then I would think that pointing out that "someone who's not interested and pressed for time won't put any effort into it" is a perfectly fine answer. The clear implication is that the resources currently available for would-be Erlang adopters require an unrealistic level of interest and time to get them over the hump. It tells an Erlang evangelist precisely what she needs to do: do more to sell the language to people who have little time or inclination to rally dig into a language they otherwise know nothing about. (Of course, while it may be a useful answer, it is not very interesting for the rest of us.)

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

#109

Post by vertex-four »

Guvante wrote: post #87
vertex-four wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Based on this I'm guessing that Erlang is one of those functional languages that are great for mathematical proof-like software development but not practical for solving actual problems because the world is mutable and the language constructs are not. It was actually designed to solve actual problems. Specifically, extremely high reliability in some of Ericsson's core networking gear. I'd recommend Learn You Some E…

You misunderstand his point. He isn't saying that Erlang is a toy language, he is saying that documentation makes Erlang look like a toy language. i.e. showing him how his thought was wrong doesn't change the fact that many other people will probably make a similar thoughts.

No, I understood the OP's point, I just decided to point them towards a better resource in the case that they do want to learn more about it at some point. I agree that the Erlang site is utterly dreadful.
Post reply on HN