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Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

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Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#12
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took 5 minutes for me to read, its actually really short.

Its not a matter of time taken. Having to swipe/scroll/space/key to read 1 new sentence, 130 times, really sucks.

It actually works a lot better if you turn Javascript off. Then it's all one big page and you just scroll down.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#13
Does that RedMonk chart not show that it is fairly cool? You have C# and Java at the top - I wouldn't call them cool, widespread, not cool. It's above, on both axes Arduino, Dart, TypeScript. It's in the vicinity of Clojure, Go, CoffeeScript.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#14
1. It is good the cool kids are not drawn to Erlang because then we would end up in the state Ruby and Node are now. 2. The biggest fail in IT - "I can't find experienced developers in Erlang/": Most employers are muppets. Rather than hire a decent developer and allow them to learn a new tech on the role, they scour the market for candidates that are probably just lying on the resume/CV. I have already seen resumes/CVs claiming 5 years+ of Swift on iOS. Quite a few retarded HR departments will fall for this.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#15
What I would like addressed by someone from Erlang is the reality of Celluloid in Ruby, and do honest comparisons.

http://celluloid.io

Otherwise, the speaker seems like a good representative, but the presentation is so verbose it makes me want to concurrently handle his thesis asynchronously in parallel threads and remove the human... in jRuby, using Celluloid.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#16
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took 5 minutes for me to read, its actually really short.

Its not a matter of time taken. Having to swipe/scroll/space/key to read 1 new sentence, 130 times, really sucks.

Both arrow keys and spacebar work just fine.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#17
post #11

Since there are actor libraries like akka targeting the JVM and claiming to offer similar benefits, why should someone prefer erlang?

Because Akka can't magically patch over the JVM's shared memory model: http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/snapshot/general/jmm.html#jmm-s...

And because the JVM does global stop-the-world garbage collection, which makes soft real-time implausible because of the unpredictability of GC affecting your actors. Erlang has per-process heaps.

Basically the Erlang VM was created for this use case while the JVM was not, and its not something you can just add with a library.

edit: Also the lightweightness of Erlang processes compared to Java threads[1] and hot code upgrades.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/hKMJ3HD.png

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#18
post #11

Since there are actor libraries like akka targeting the JVM and claiming to offer similar benefits, why should someone prefer erlang?

Erlang allows the actors to be spread across physical nodes. It's like a cluster OS, not just a language that uses an actor model.

Do any of the library actor models offer something like that?

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#20
post #11

Since there are actor libraries like akka targeting the JVM and claiming to offer similar benefits, why should someone prefer erlang?

Erlang is not just classes with a thread and a queue attached to it. Anyone can do it. It is also fault tolerance. How many of the actor libraries support creating large number of processes that have isolate heaps? How many have completely concurrent and pause-less garbage collectors?

The closer abstraction is probably OS processes + IPC. Then you get closer to the spirit of it. And Chrome browser and other software take that approach. It isolates faults. But well, you have to do a lot more work around it and those are not exactly light-weight. Erlang processes are only a few K of memory each.

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