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What can I only do in Erlang?

erlang.org

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Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#21

Post by dozzie »

cowabunga wrote: post #11

Not sure I agree with the conclusions: 1. Binaries: this isn't really an issue. We ship the JVM with anything that we do in Java. Unzip, run, done. Go is probably ideal there but it doesn't support embedded resources without some hideous hacks so you're still going to be deploying more than just a single binary in a lot of cases. CLR is pretty good at this as well. 2. Sockets: 0MQ/WCF/JMS/any stream abstraction wired…

1. I don't see how this is related to working with binary data.

2. Apparently you haven't worked with Erlang. The point here is you don't write much networking, you write message handling exactly in the same manner as you would for communicating inside the application, without any networking. 0MQ, WCF and JMS don't even remotely resemble the operation model for network connectivity in Erlang.

3? (Let it crash) And you needed to specifically design your application, including supervision (you do have it, right?). Erlang provides all that already.

4. You didn't get what supervision is about. It's about restarting process when it crashes, crashing all the related processes and aborting when restarts are too frequent.

> It's easier to get staff,

It's easier to get some staff, but it may be much harder to get good staff. Signal-to-noise ratio is very bad among Java programmers. And it's quite hard to find bad Erlang programmer once you find somebody who can write in Erlang (or learn it quickly).

It's not that Erlang provides one specific killer feature that makes it great choice. It's that Erlang provides plenty of nice things already built in, and all that sums up to a platform that one would want to use every day. You don't have good binaries syntax on top of JVM. You don't have good logging framework in standard JVM. You still need external libraries for sensible network programming. You have to design your application specifically to handle thread failures. You can't just spawn a thread for every request running and be done with the job. You don't have a distributed soft real-time database. And the list goes on.

You just need to do much work before you even start programming, and then to manage all that (which is no easy task), just because your platform doesn't provide any of the mentioned things and its working model is less convenient for writing network services.

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#22

Post by Spearchucker »

bachback wrote: post #15

ZeroMQ gives you the same but better: messaging in any language. That means you can interface to any component you want written in any language you want. Also hiding native sockets, which means networking is not 1:1 but based on scalability patterns. At some point people will realize what a big deal that is.

Nobody needs reliable messaging: http://www.infoq.com/articles/no-reliable-messaging

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#23

Post by StavrosK »

johnloeber wrote: post #10
StavrosK wrote: post #3

Only semi on-topic: Anyone hiring experienced remote Erlang developers? 30 years of experience or so.

30 years?! Erlang was published internally by Ericsson in 1986, so you were (or know someone) on the original development team or among the first users?

Sorry, I may be assuming incorrectly. The person is in their 50s, and they're the most experienced developer I know (and can pick stuff up very quickly), so I assumed they'd have 30+ years of Erlang experience.

It only dawned on me later that Erlang was only created in the 80s, so I must have misspoken, but yeah, my friend is one of the best developers I've had the pleasure of working with regardless.

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#24

Post by ccozan »

StavrosK wrote: post #3

Only semi on-topic: Anyone hiring experienced remote Erlang developers? 30 years of experience or so.

My next start-up will be based almost 100% in Erlang ecosystem. So, once this happens, I will definitively look for experienced people, working remote. I would add you to my candidates, if you send me a CV to costin at cozan dot com.

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#25

Post by tormeh »

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 would take a look at akka instead. Distributed actor concurrency and local STM.. Oh my.

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#26

Post by bachback »

Spearchucker wrote: post #22
bachback wrote: post #15

ZeroMQ gives you the same but better: messaging in any language. That means you can interface to any component you want written in any language you want. Also hiding native sockets, which means networking is not 1:1 but based on scalability patterns. At some point people will realize what a big deal that is.

Nobody needs reliable messaging: http://www.infoq.com/articles/no-reliable-messaging

Tell that people who are trying to build scalable network applications. Saltstack uses ZeroMQ under the hood and the biggest cloud computing operations in the world use it. That article reads like from a past age, where you didn't have startups scaling to millions of users based on cloud computing. HTTP was invented for retrieving hypertext documents. Not for connecting millions of nodes.

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#27

Post by mahmud »

Op's work environment is exceptional in many ways. It's a quintessential hacker work place. Unbelievable flexibility. I am sure a place like that attracts people who can make any technical edge, however miniscule, into a real felt advantage. I want to learn about their management, hiring and culture-building practices more than their actual hacking triumphs.

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#28

Post by StavrosK »

ccozan wrote: post #24
StavrosK wrote: post #3

Only semi on-topic: Anyone hiring experienced remote Erlang developers? 30 years of experience or so.

My next start-up will be based almost 100% in Erlang ecosystem. So, once this happens, I will definitively look for experienced people, working remote. I would add you to my candidates, if you send me a CV to costin at cozan dot com.

It's not me, but I'll pass your email on, thanks!

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#30

Post by minikomi »

mahmud wrote: post #27

Op's work environment is exceptional in many ways. It's a quintessential hacker work place. Unbelievable flexibility. I am sure a place like that attracts people who can make any technical edge, however miniscule, into a real felt advantage. I want to learn about their management, hiring and culture-building practices more than their actual hacking triumphs.

Indeed. I'd love to progressively improve a system in Erlang over a year (!) ..

Another thing, tangentially related, which I've been thinking about lately: I'd love to do an apprenticeship with an old-school erlang hacker.. haskell hacker or lisp hacker who learnt the hard way in the field.

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