Erlang is dark magic. Not intended for the faint of heart.
Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?
121–130 of 244 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not knowing enough about Erlang/OTP or Go: Would it be possible for more of OTP to be replicated in a Go 2.0? What's missing? What would it take? What can never be replicated?
Erlang is like Lisp in that once you build a language up to a level of "reliable disturbed system language," you've basically re-implemented Erlang.
Is "disturbed system" intentional? Nice term for a bunch of processes which are expected to die occasionally.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?
#123Tons of people mention Elixir in threads like these. Is anybody actually using it in production, or is it just something that Rubyists use as a foil to criticize Erlang's syntax?
I feel the algol-ization of (functional, prototypical)javascript is a confusing mess and a weakness that makes js harder to use. Making Erlang look object-oriented just seems awkward.
Syntax: comma means AND, semicolon means OR, period means "done." Is that so crazy? There's no comparison to how badly Perl does my head in.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why Oracle hasn't bought Azul and made it available to all, for free.
Azul only works well on multi-processor machines with LOTS of RAM, but when it does, it beats everything else out there by a mile. You'd think Oracle would want that.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
> the resources currently available for would-be Erlang adopters require an unrealistic level of interest and time to get them over the hump. The person who can't be bothered to even find 'Learn You Some Erlang' also won't have the motivation to learn Erlang. It does take effort, but there now are many good resources available (unlike the situation just a few years ago).
I believe you missed the point. When I first heard about Go, I went to the official website and I was immediately presented with a few code examples. The go tour was fascinatingly good introductory material. Furthermore, the documentation and language specification are very concise, clear and full of examples.
What am I trying to say? Put effort into presenting your language and I will put effort into going through the material.
Give me two shit and that's how much interest you will get from me.
However, I put my own effort into finding more resources. I tried Erlang, it was OK, but I wasn't very comfortable working with the syntax. I've never needed any special feature in Erlang that I couldn't accomplish in another language.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come on. Not exactly a good faith effort, is it? Why type in a rant like this, when you could have found a wonderful tutorial on Google in one tenth of the time it took you to write this?
100% of erlang tutorials are for fibonnaci.
I never understood why every language has a plethora of fibonnaci tutorials. "DO THE FIBONNACI IN X USING Z PROGRAMMING PARADIGM" ok thanks, no more please.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come on. Not exactly a good faith effort, is it? Why type in a rant like this, when you could have found a wonderful tutorial on Google in one tenth of the time it took you to write this?
100% of erlang tutorials are for fibonnaci.
I never understood why every language has a plethora of fibonnaci tutorials. "DO THE FIBONNACI IN X USING Z PROGRAMMING PARADIGM" ok thanks, no more please.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?
#128Didn't understand how to use dializer. Situation seems to have improved since I tried last time, because of learnyousomeerlang.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?
#129Erlang 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.
It's amazing and powerful if you need 1m+ client connections per server.
It's pretty dang easy to do that today with LuaJIT/C, and you don't get any of the other baggage (weird syntax, sub-standard string handling, lack of libs, etc.).
I'm literally building something that is right in Erlang's wheelhouse—exactly what is is designed for, and I'm not using it, despite knowing that, because it's easier for me to get exactly what I want in LuaJIT/C today.
I get garbage collection when I want it. I get arena allocation when I want it, too.
I get custom JIT-compiled functions when I want them (DynASM), but I also get JIT-compiled methods in Lua when performance matters less.
I can talk directly to my network hardware with a driver written in Lua. That's likely possible in Erlang, but I have no idea how and no time to learn, either.
I also know how to solve anything I'm likely to encounter in C. With Erlang, I'd have to learn a new way to solve it. Who knows how long that would take to do well?
I really do like Erlang at the conceptual level, but not enough to endure all of the other things I don't like about it. I'm also far less concerned about C than I was 10 years ago. The tooling around C these days is really quite incredible for people who want to do safety-critical systems, or high-availability systems, or whatever. You can get as much assurance about your code as you want with a reasonable amount of effort.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?
#130To me it sounds like Erlang's biggest departure from the mainstream is http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LetItCrash, casually letting processes die and be recreated. When I put effort into actually using a niche language (as opposed to merely learning it for fun) I expect it to enable me to write software that's less embarrassingly defective than everyone else's, where Erlang only seeks to reduce the pain from my doing bad work.