Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

gar1t.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 128 posts

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#81

Post by mrottenkolber »

Almaviva wrote: post #34
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 :)

That or they just would rather suffer than talk to or work with another human being.

Why did you even bother writing that, is it supposed to be funny? Because there is certainly no truth or utility to this ridiculous speculation.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#82

Post by to3m »

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?

Assuming this isn't supposed to be rhetorical - yes, it works pretty well in fact. Windows's bizarrely ropey FS performance means it's a bit slower, but in general the experience is basically the same as using it under OS X. SourceTree/git gui/gitk are work the same.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#83

Post by metaobject »

CmonDev wrote: post #37
kyberias wrote: post #31

A semi-interesting observation of the graph on one of the first slides: C# is highest on StackOverflow metric because the site has been historically concentrating more on Microsoft technologies. This also shows on how the different languages are separated by the diagonal line: technologies/languages closer to Microsoft are above the line and more "open" alternatives are under the line.

How can an open free Q&A site be concentrated on something? It simply reflects what people want and need.

It's kind of like how HN was initially very programming/computer science/lisp (?) centric in its early days (at least it seemed that way to me) primarily because of the people who read pgs essays and were interested in start-ups, etc.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#86

Post by toast0 »

rdtsc wrote: post #56
yummyfajitas wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java/Scala do allow you to do bad things. So add the following to Hershel's question: "Assume developers are non-malicious and will only pass immutable objects across actor/future boundaries." Also, I'm not that familiar with Erlang's memory model, so I might be wrong on this. But as far as I'm aware the memory for a message in Erlang is shared between threads - it's only local variables that use private memory. This…

> But as far as I'm aware the memory for a message in Erlang is shared between threads Yes and no. Some large binaries (a specific Erlang data type, that can say represent a packet or block of data from disk), will be shared and reference counted when passed between processes instead of copied. They are immutable just like most datatypes in Erlang. These binaries have a specific GC algorithm that it just might take l…

The large binary GC is actually pretty simple too: Shared binaries are refcounted; the references are in the process heap. When the references are GCed from the process, the shared binary can be freed. The reason that sometimes it takes a long time to free, is that some types of processes will get references to a large number of binaries, but not trigger a process garbage collection, leaving lots of binaries allocated in the shared space. Garbage collection for a process is only automatically triggered when the process heap would grow, so there are some common cases which result in bad behavior: processes that don't generate much garbage on their heap, but do touch a lot of binaries (often this is request routing); processes that grow their heap to some large size doing one kind of work, but then switch to another type that doesn't use much heap space, leaving a long time between GC; processes that touch a lot of binaries but then don't do any processing for a long time (maybe a periodic cleanup task).

Another common issues is taking references to a small part of a large shared binary.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#87

Post by njharman »

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?

The value proposition of Erlang is a great deal more than "we have actors". Actors and message passing are "symptoms" of built from the core out for fault tolerant networked multiprocessing. If you need that you should prefer Erlang.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#88

Post by micampe »

cpncrunch wrote: post #70
cpncrunch wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Explain downvote please.

Negativity. I didn’t downvote but even agreeng with you and being frustrated with the website I was put off by the tone of your comment.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#89

Post by cpncrunch »

snicker wrote: post #72
cpncrunch wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In powerpoint you can click on the slide to move to the next one.
Post reply on HN