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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

#71

Post by eeperson »

waffle_ss wrote: post #17
hershel wrote: 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…

JVMs can have a separate heap for each thread. See the Avian JVM[1] for an example of this.

[1] http://oss.readytalk.com/avian/

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#72

Post by snicker »

cpncrunch wrote: post #61
josteink wrote: post #40

This thing is completely unreadable on a phone. Does it have a more phone-friendly version somewhere?

It's not really much better on a browser. It took me about 10 minutes of clicking and swiping to figure out that you're meant to use the cursor keys to navigate. What a shitty user experience...

Seems like they used a Powerpoint-esque framework... it's not really intuitive when you think of it like the average web page, but for giving a presentation it's quite good

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#73

Post by perturbation »

walshemj wrote: post #35
alttab wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly enough, in both the start up and corporate world I've seen hiring when the developer has NO skill in the language. This was true about Java, this was true about Ruby. This was true about python... I think what would be a more interesting analysis is what cohort pre-selects themselves to functional languages, or projects where that technology is used? Out of all the software today, where is the most prom…

That's what happened at my first job hired as a research assistant at a world leading research place. My instructions where Keith will give you an hours instruction on how to use the PDP there is a book on fortan in the company library go and learn it. Oh BTW that was leaving high school with 5 O Levels

What is an O Level?

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#74

Post by cw0 »

jnbiche wrote: post #62
disputin wrote: post #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.

>It's above, on both axes Arduino... Does anyone know why they would include a hardware device among a ranking of programming languages? The most prominent language used to program Arduinos is probably C, followed by C++ and then AVR assembly. I don't understand why they would include it among programming languages.

From the official docs: "The Arduino programming language is an implementation of Wiring, a similar physical computing platform, which is based on the Processing multimedia programming environment." and "the Arduino language is merely a set of C/C++ functions that can be called from your code."

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#75

Post by [deleted] »

rdtsc wrote: post #50
general_failure wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's bad about the state of node? Or are you saying Erlang is underdeveloped and you would prefer it that way. Because in my eyes, node is doing great.

I think, the implication was that it attracts a disproportionate number of inexperienced yet very vocal and immature crowds. It creates and unfriendly and unpleasant community. Also the marketing innovation or advantage it proclaims -- "callbacks as a concurrency mechanism" are thought by some to betray a understanding of how concurrency can be handled in a sane way. So anything said or promoted afterwards is discard…

[deleted]

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#76

Post by MCRed »

crdb wrote: post #27
rwmj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this thing about having to find developers in a particular language. I work on a lot of OCaml programs, and have used and hired developers to work on the same programs. None of them had OCaml experience before, but they just learned it as they went along (because they are intelligent programmers). I actively don't want someone who only knows one language. Also we're using RabbitMQ (written in Erlang). At…

This would be a valid reason: http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html I agree with you that whilst familiarity with a rare, powerful language might be a signal of quality, lack of familiarity with rare languages does not imply the reverse.

This effect is even more pronounced with erlang, which has had several waves of popularity, going back to at least 2007. Because the language is harder to learn than most other languages due to the syntax being perceived as "difficult" (and it is for a week or two before you see its elegance) the barrier for entry is actually higher than many other languages.

Someone coming from Java has to learn both FP and the erlang syntax at the same time.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#77

Post by JBiserkov »

mpyne wrote: post #55
CmonDev wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jon Skeet is a Google developer. Well early Git adopters were Linux developers. Does it mean that GitHub is not really mainstream apart from a narrow group of people?

> Does it mean that GitHub is not really mainstream apart from a narrow group of people? Does git even work well on Windows yet?

Yes it does - command-line, GitHub for Windows, SourceTree, IDE plugin - you name it, it has it.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#78

Post by [deleted] »

perturbation wrote: post #73
walshemj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what happened at my first job hired as a research assistant at a world leading research place. My instructions where Keith will give you an hours instruction on how to use the PDP there is a book on fortan in the company library go and learn it. Oh BTW that was leaving high school with 5 O Levels

What is an O Level?

[deleted]

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#80

Post by mrottenkolber »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #19

An interesting thing is Common Lisp's place in the graph. It roughly translates to saying Common Lispers have less woes relatively. The CL nerds were right all along :)

No, it translates into CL is quite widespread but we don't use SO (we have CLHS/good documentation, c.l.lisp, #lisp, loads of mailing lists etc.).

Also SO is kind of geared towards entry level programmers, which applies to few CL folks.

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