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

What can I only do in Erlang?

erlang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 173 posts

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#2

Post by davidw »

This is a pretty good summary of what makes Erlang unique. There's definitely a learning curve, as he says, but once you start to 'get it', you can make some really solid stuff with it.

I've been having a lot of success with remotely debugging things with observer ( http://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/observer/observer_ug.html ) and Recon ( http://ferd.github.io/recon/ ). I've been using the latter to compile code locally and quickly deploy it to a remote machine (while it's running, of course) to debug problems without going through a whole commit/pull/build cycle.

Some of the other responses in the thread are pretty good too:

http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2014-November/t...

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#4

Post by willvarfar »

Curious how much people think Go will eat into Erlang? Many of the points made were about Erlang as CSP and that's Go-territory.

Loïc Hogun (author of Cowboy, other projects) said:

  For me Erlang is first fault tolerant, then concurrent,
  then functional
As Go gains libraries like groupcache will it become more and more go-to for networked and shared systems?

Is Go moving up from concurrent to fault-tolerant in a real way?

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#6

Post by davidw »

willvarfar wrote: post #4

Curious how much people think Go will eat into Erlang? Many of the points made were about Erlang as CSP and that's Go-territory. Loïc Hogun (author of Cowboy, other projects) said: For me Erlang is first fault tolerant, then concurrent, then functional As Go gains libraries like groupcache will it become more and more go-to for networked and shared systems? Is Go moving up from concurrent to fault-tolerant in a real…

If you dig around in HN's search there are a lot of good comments from people like jerf on the differences:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5451916

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7943248

But there are more here and there if you hunt for them.

I think for things where they are sort of similar, Go will definitely be the more successful language because it looks so much more familiar and because it's moving faster with more momentum, at this point.

I'm using Erlang for a semi-embedded thing at the moment, though, where stability is more important.

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#7

Post by edgurgel »

willvarfar wrote: post #4

Curious how much people think Go will eat into Erlang? Many of the points made were about Erlang as CSP and that's Go-territory. Loïc Hogun (author of Cowboy, other projects) said: For me Erlang is first fault tolerant, then concurrent, then functional As Go gains libraries like groupcache will it become more and more go-to for networked and shared systems? Is Go moving up from concurrent to fault-tolerant in a real…

I like this blog post (http://blog.erlware.org/some-thoughts-on-go-and-erlang/) as it talks about some of the differences about them. For some of these reasons I don't think they solve the same issues and one won't eat the other.

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#8

Post by Xorlev »

willvarfar wrote: post #4

Curious how much people think Go will eat into Erlang? Many of the points made were about Erlang as CSP and that's Go-territory. Loïc Hogun (author of Cowboy, other projects) said: For me Erlang is first fault tolerant, then concurrent, then functional As Go gains libraries like groupcache will it become more and more go-to for networked and shared systems? Is Go moving up from concurrent to fault-tolerant in a real…

I think Go has a long way to (forgive the pun) go before it can really start to compete with the entire Erlang ecosystem. Only having a modest knowledge it both, Erlang is still built around stability. Hot code patching, an extremely instrumentable VM, the whole OTP framework, simple networked Actors. Erlang was built with telecom in mind.

That's not to say they can't inhabit a lot of the same areas, but Go's area of interests will probably remain somewhat separate from Erlang.

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#9

Post by radmuzom »

In 2005, I worked in software development for 6 months before abandoning it for another field.

In my new job, I was given the task of writing a server for a messaging application - which would allow users to send a "hand-drawn" message from our own proprietary handheld device to Windows phones. I was told to learn Erlang and get it done - the company was barely 30 people and had no formal training programs. While I have a degree in theoretical computer science, I didn't do much functional programming before - learnt some Haskell in 2001 in college (just the basics, equivalent of first 6 chapters of LYAH, no monads). I remember learning Erlang over the weekend and delivering it in the first week of my job. Obviously, the code was neither great nor scalable - but I write this not to boast but to tell people that Erlang was so beautiful and easy that even an average intelligence person like me could use to produce functional software in a week. Today, my only regret is that I am not a programmer.

Post reply on HN