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Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

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

#161

Post by virtualwhys »

nousernamesleft wrote: post #58
theophrastus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have picked up my copy of "Real World Haskell" (Bryan O'Sullivan et.al) about three times; each time ended up nearly starting over and each time making it about ten pages or so more in, (i guess it's a recursive language at several levels). It's a fascinating approach, but egads, it requires a thousand fold more effort to get into than any other language i've learned. somewhere between the monads and the syntax..[h…

I'm always baffled by these kinds of statements. I learned ocaml first, so haskell wasn't too big a leap for me. But I did get to watch my wife go through the process of learning haskell, and she didn't have any more problems than learning any other language. My wife is a web designer. She has no interest in programming. She taught herself PHP and javascript because she needed to use them. When she finally got to the…

I would like to see these 2 big sites that your wife has single handedly done in Haskell with a "just use do and the arrow things" understanding.

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

#162

Post by bfrog »

seancribbs wrote: post #32
bfrog wrote: post #13

It has a huge learning curve compared to many other languages. Ask the simple question of how do you write the equivalent of int main(....) { ... } and well... there isn't one! You are almost forced, from the start, to learn about releases and a ton of other really complicated stuff just to write a program you can share. Its sort of being fixed with relx. Secondly no one seems to understand pattern matching at first.…

#!/usr/bin/env escript main(_) -> io:format("hello, world").

Fair enough, but thats not how the books and documentation present erlang. They present it with the shell and c()

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

#163

Post by jroesch »

vertex-four wrote: post #107
nousernamesleft wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Have you interacted with the Haskell community? The Haskell community is made up of individuals who come to Haskell from a variety of different backgrounds. Yes there are a lot of Computer Scientists using Haskell, but not all of us are programming languages PhDs. There are people who are interested in designing hardware and build HDLs in Haskell. There are others who use it for its correctness and performance characteristics when building large scale systems. Some are just doing web development. The community is probably one of the most helpful and friendly as well. The people in the IRC channel are always ready to help and encourage new comers with resources and advice. I have had a much better experience in #haskell them I ever had in #ruby, and usually the explanations are correct and clear.

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

#164

Post by hapless »

rvirding wrote: post #149
erichocean wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exa…

Yes, and you will end up reimplementing a lot of what is already in Erlang and most likely not as well either. Virding's 1st rule.

This is true, but it misses the point: Erlang is missing enough things that this fellow would rather rewrite OTP in Lua than deal with Erlang.

e.g. string handling

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

#166

Post by hapless »

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.

Something Erlang fans rarely mention: only one generation of equipment used the OTP.

In other words, it was stillborn.

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

#167

Post by hapless »

vertex-four wrote: post #67
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…

> 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…

For the record, only one generation of equipment used Erlang/OTP. As a part of Ericsson's hardware platform, it was very short-lived.

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

#168

Post by jwatte »

We've developed and run a rather large erlang cluster (> 100k simultaneous users) for several years. It's pretty clear that OTP is not ready for that scale -- most of our big bugs have been in the libraries and OTP, not in our code. Couple that with the poor type safety at compile time, and a "in place update" model that doesn't actually work for "many times a day" continuous deployment, and I feel it's not lived up to the hype. We also run PHP, C++ and Haskell stacks, each of which has had less environment-based problems.

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

#169

Post by lincolnq »

parallelist wrote: post #82
lincolnq wrote: post #7

I've tried using Erlang once or twice. I inherited an open source project written in it, wanted to maintain it a bit but I couldn't make head nor tail of it, and I'm a good programmer (but very busy with other things). There were too many things to learn to get started working with the Erlang ecosystem and I didn't really have the time. I didn't find any good tools. The error messages were obtuse. I didn't understand…

Are you a good programmer in imperative languages only by any chance?

No - I've done a number of FP projects, but certainly spent less time with it than imperative languages. Here are some FP projects I've done --

    * Compiler for a scheme-like language in Haskell
    * simple webapp in Haskell using Yesod
    * small 2d game in Clojure
    * racket-based little language that compiles to openscad
    * lots of academic programming-languages projects in Racket
      (garbage collector, type checker, prolog, etc)

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

#170

Post by pjmlp »

Jtsummers wrote: post #49
jerf wrote: post #16

Honestly, I think what kills it is that it's not an Algol-descended language [1]. If Erlang was written with an Algol-esque syntax it would have taken off years ago. But instead it has this weird syntax, which it then doesn't really do that much with. What do I mean by that? Haskell has a radically different syntax, but it does things with that syntax and its pervasive currying to enable a powerful succinctness that…

> I'm pretty sure Go is going to eat Erlang. I wouldn't be surprised by this. Go's concurrency pattern is fantastic, but to match what Erlang does it needs to be easily extended beyond the running process. Can channels connect multiple "nodes" yet? That is, two running go programs, can they communicate via channels or do they have to use some other IPC mechanism? Across a network? That universal communication structu…

> I wouldn't be surprised by this. Go's concurrency pattern is fantastic

Only for those not versed in java.util.concurrent, TPL, PPL, TBB, Cilk Plus.

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