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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?

#181

Post by davidw »

rvirding wrote: post #174
hapless wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

From personal experience implementing the string handling is trivial compared to implementing the system side of Erlang. Get real.

For those following along at home, rvirding is one of the inventors of Erlang.

Robert - one of the things that occasionally bothers me about Erlang is that if something like string handling is so trivial, then it should be made available as a more extensive library, rather than an exercise that leaves the reader wishing they were using another language that handles boring stuff like that. It may well not be trivial for the person just get started with it, and you've lost a user if they give up in frustration.

Here's one of the other inventors of the language asking for help about splitting a string, for instance:

http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2014-February/0...

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

#182

Post by jamii »

paperwork wrote: post #63
jamii wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a total of about 11 months (spread over a few years) consulting on a betting exchange in erlang. It was pretty painful even with lots of erlang experience. I sat down one week and prototyped a rewrite of the core exchange in clojure. 40x better throughput and 10x better latency despite using only two threads, naive `pr-str` serialisation and storing all the exchange state in one huge immutable data structure…

As non-mainstream languages go, in the financial industry, Scala is picking up steam. However, clojure is at the top of my list as the language I want to learn, despite obstacles of limited time. Lisp has an impressive pedigree and Rich Hickey is a smart, pragmatic dude who seems to have spent a great deal of time thinking about reducing complexity in real-world software engineering.

I think that's the real strength of clojure - not the language itself but that the community around it is focused on radically reducing complexity.

Every project I have ever worked on that struggled or failed did so because the complexity outgrew the developers ability to manage it. It kind of scares me that scala is growing so quickly - from my experience working on a large scala project it seems to breed complexity like nothing else I've ever worked with (haskell, python, ocaml, erlang, clojure).

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

#183

Post by pjungwir »

mononcqc wrote: post #158
jerf wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can recover a substantial portion, but there's a few things you can't quite get back. Since Go is a mutable-state language, and also a shared-state language (isolation is by convention, not by language design), you have to live with the consequences of that. In my supervisor tree implementation, the restart of a monitored goroutine is just to fire off a new goroutine on the exact same object again; if you still h…

I'd have to say your idea of supervisors misses the point. Supervised processes provide guarantees in their initialization phase, not a best effort. This means that they are always restarted to a known stable state. It's not just a question of retrying, it's a question of returning to a piece of data and environment that is reliable. I wrote on this more in details at http://ferd.ca/it-s-about-the-guarantees.html If…

It is funny to me that Erlang combines unique tools for application stability with the ability to edit stuff online in production. I'm not saying I never launch a production Rails console, but seeing that in Erlang is a weird juxtaposition. I'd love to understand better how those fit together comfortably in an Erlanger's world view.

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

#184

Post by joelreymont »

seldo wrote: post #9

Since you asked: I have never tried Erlang because I've heard it's like Haskell but harder to learn, and Haskell already breaks my feeble mind, so I have steered clear. This may or may not be an accurate picture, but it was my decision-making process. I have no programming problems that make me think learning a whole new language would be worth it (on top of my existng stack of 10 or so).

This is very old but...

http://wagerlabs.com/blog/2006/01/01/haskell-vs-erlang-reloa...

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

#185

Post by 9999 »

I've actually always wanted to use Erlang and I've worked on quite a few projects where it probably would have been the best solution possible (massively concurrent websocket backends for example). The two things that made Erlang a non-starter on those projects were:

1) It's hard to find people that have production experience with Erlang 2) The perception is that batteries are not included (even in comparison with Go... if you have some information to refute that notion I would be more than happy to learn more)

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

#186

Post by 6d0debc071 »

> Never used Erlang nor considered it

---------------

Well, I guess only the first part of that is true now. :p

But yeah: Why not Erlang?

I haven't seen a good pitch for it that addresses anything we're interested in.

Erlang's big thing seems to be that it scales. We don't have that as a major problem for our programming. If we did, I imagine I'd be interested in quantitative comparisons with other programming languages for similarly advanced code, (i.e. I wouldn't want to read some ungodly shitfest alongside decent code as the argument that Erlang was better.)

To be convinced from that perspective, I'd have to:

A) Know ahead of time that we were going to be in a position where we'd need that sort of optimisation

B) Know, or strongly suspect, that we wouldn't have to expend more effort learning Erlang than we would optimising it to 'good enough' performance in another language.

C) Be assured that I'd be able to hire sufficiently intelligent programmers who knew, or were willing to learn, Erlang to maintain things if I set up in it.

That seems a rather niche position to be in requiring both a very strong pitch for that advantage on the part of Erlang, and a significant degree of foresight on my part. If it takes six months to a year to gear up for starting a decent Erlang solution, we'd best be expecting to do massive systems engineering fairly frequently as compared to writing the solution in something that we know right now for that to pay off.

People may say that it's trivial to implement what's missing in Erlang, as compared to the systems side of things that's missing in some already known language. That may be true, I don't pretend to know enough about it to comment on it. However, even if it's so, is it sufficiently harder to implement something that scales out to the required efficiency in Known-Language-X than it is to learn Erlang to that level? Especially given that there's probably already community support for scaling in Known-Language-X.

#

It does seem to have some other nice features. But from that perspective - and this was my first response on dipping into Learn You... I look at it and think 'This looks kinda like Haskell. Why not use Haskell?' or, as the case may be, 'Why not Lisp?' Both of which I've some experience with and would be easier to find good programmers for.

In that regard Erlang is competing with some damn powerful languages.

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

#187

Post by davidw »

rvirding wrote: post #147

I am not going to enter into a syntax argument I have already given my views on that here http://rvirding.blogspot.se/2014/01/erlang-syntax-again-and-... . My main point is that the syntax is simple and that it fits the semantics much better than anything based on an Algol like syntax would, even one which uses ';' in the "normal" way. And one reason it works is because it has built-in those features for building fau…

> And one reason it works is because it has built-in those features for building fault-tolerant systems which, for example, Go lacks.

Very few people really need that though, so from a marketing point of view, to sell that as the primary feature is to consign Erlang to a fairly small niche.

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

#188

Post by 501 »

I've posted these before[1]:

* No public bug tracker

* epmd's security (or lack thereof)

* Can't insist that epmd be started separately (`erl -no_epmd` won't start epmd but it also won't start epmd's gen_server)

* Can't swap out epmd because while `erl -epmd_module foo` is there, `net_kernel:epmd_module()` is barely used. (Although I don't think its interface is documented anyway)

* No built-in way to hook UNIX signals

* While the documentation itself is pretty good, it's presentation is lacking and it's difficult to quickly correct mistakes as you run into them

* It can be difficult to reason about when a shared binary will be garbage collected

* OS packaging (I'm thinking of Debian/Ubuntu) of Erlang and Erlang apps tends to be more harmful than helpful (old packages, namespace conflicts, etc)

To them I'd add:

* No agreed upon build tool (rebar while prevalent isn't universally accepted)

* Community libraries often have no support for upgrades or aren't packaged properly for releases

* Can't upgrade SSL if you're using it as a carrier

* No standard code format tool like gofmt (yes I know about erl_tidy, no it doesn't provide the same functionality as gofmt or it'd see similar use)

* Not enough infrastructure around built around edoc; where's the godoc or godoc.org work-a-likes? (yes I know about erldocs.com, it's no godoc.org)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5801706

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

#189

Post by arh68 »

gordonguthrie wrote: post #86
arh68 wrote: post #62

Popularity is probably the worst metric for a programming language. Programmers conflate popular for good pretty often. They line up often, but they are orthogonal. The original question is loaded. Why not ask "What usually increases a language's popularity? How can these effects be applied to Erlang?" Now the answers are a bit more useful, a bit more constructive: * write more, better docs (Erlang for Java programme…

I wrote the question and I agree that popularity isn't a good metric (on its own). But it is a valid metric, in the round. Making a language more popular has to start with people who don't use it though, so no apologies for being a bit populist in my phrasing...

You are right: it is a valid metric.

It's the quality of the language that counts, but it's the popularity that matters.

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

#190

Post by digitalzombie »

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…

Erlang scheduler time share each processes. So if you have an infinite forloop, it while stop for several ms for other processes to run.

Preemptive scheduler, I doubt Go have this, then again Go doesn't have a VM/OS system.

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