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What can I only do in Erlang?

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Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#121

Post by ColinWright »

triangleman wrote: post #118
ColinWright wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your reply - it's very useful to me to see the viewpoints of others. It's becoming clearer all the time that my use of and views on language are very much in the minority. However, to respond ... > "Only" is an adverb in this case, > and can be placed anywhere in the > sentence for stylistic reasons. That doesn't seem right to me. Only what can I do in Erlang? What can only I do in Erlang? What can I on…

OK, maybe "anywhere in the sentence" goes too far. But the need for style in writing is super-important. If I was telling you about how to beat the 2nd level of Legend of Zelda, I might say You can only get to the final boss by taking the door on the right. Or I might say You can get to the final boss only by taking the door on the right. Which phrase has more impact in your opinion? Also note that in neither of thes…

I agree entirely that style is important, and moving words around can create different effects. No doubt about that.

Consider your example. You offer:

    You can only get to the final boss
        by taking the door on the right.
I don't know if that means that (a) if I take the door on the right then the only thing I can get to is the final boss, or if it means that (b) to get to the final boss the only thing that will be successful is to take the door on the right.

On the other hand:

    You can get to the final boss only
        by taking the door on the right.
That doesn't seem to suffer the same ambiguity.

The question is whether, for any given case, stylistic effects trump less ambiguity. People seem to think it does more often than I do.

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#122

Post by rdtsc »

bfrog wrote: post #91
lostcolony wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which do you need sooner; fast? or correct and scalable? Erlang is built first for fault tolerance, not speed. The decisions that went into that make it also really, really good for concurrency and distribution (and so that's what it often gets touted for). The decisions that went into C++ were for speed, and compatibility with C (and all that entails). If you've got something truly resource intensive, yeah, you're g…

I feel like Rust in a way is trying to be somewhere between Erlang and C++, and in a way thats what gets me so excited about it.

Yeah I like Rust as well. Probably for the same reason you mentioned. Lately (last year or two), I think they have been moving to be closer to C++ than to Erlang.

Nothing wrong with it just an observation. Say they shed their runtime system. libgreen got moved to a separate package. Instead of relying and encouraging creating mutliple tasks and have them fail!( well panic!) now they are moving to have error traits as return values.

Again nothing wrong with it. I think it is a good move. Just observing how it started off at one side and moved towards the other.

I think it calls for a Rust-Erlang interop.library just like there is a Java one. I would like to be able to have a Rust node. Or say create NIFs in Rust perhaps.

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#123

Post by nevergetenglish »

rvirding wrote: post #119
barbudorojo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how is going the Lisp Favored Erlang project, http://lfe.io . As someone that enjoys lisp and prolog I find erlang a very nice language. Two feature I find handy: One is the ability to modify code while running, the other is OTP. Joe's thesis, available online, was for me an excellent resource to learn Erlang. I think that a good use case for Erlang is when a lot of actors are needed each one doing a little…

That about Joe is not strange actually as he has never been a C-programmer. Before coming to the lab he was a fortran programmer.

People in racket are using typep racket, clojure has annotation, in lisp you can declare types and sbcl infers them. Haskell also is fond of types. Perhaps in erlang types are not so important because you try to decompose the problem in small parts and hence is not so important to declare types?

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#124

Post by igouy »

amelius wrote: post #34

Erlang looks interesting. However, the only problem I have with starting in Erlang is that on the great computer language shootout, it shows that Erlang is about 10x slower than C++ on most examples. And about 3x slower than Go [1] I know that the problems on this website are not specifically "concurrent" problems, but still, even a distributed web-server must do some non-concurrent stuff at times :) Are my concerns…

Also shown on the benchmarks game website --

"Most (all?) large systems developed using Erlang make heavy use of C for low-level code, leaving Erlang to manage the parts which tend to be complex in other languages, like controlling systems spread across several machines and implementing complex protocol logic."

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/dont-jump-to-conclus...

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#125

Post by taybin »

rvirding wrote: post #119
barbudorojo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how is going the Lisp Favored Erlang project, http://lfe.io . As someone that enjoys lisp and prolog I find erlang a very nice language. Two feature I find handy: One is the ability to modify code while running, the other is OTP. Joe's thesis, available online, was for me an excellent resource to learn Erlang. I think that a good use case for Erlang is when a lot of actors are needed each one doing a little…

That about Joe is not strange actually as he has never been a C-programmer. Before coming to the lab he was a fortran programmer.

He learned prolog at the lab?

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#126

Post by igouy »

seiji wrote: post #108
amelius wrote: post #34

Erlang looks interesting. However, the only problem I have with starting in Erlang is that on the great computer language shootout, it shows that Erlang is about 10x slower than C++ on most examples. And about 3x slower than Go [1] I know that the problems on this website are not specifically "concurrent" problems, but still, even a distributed web-server must do some non-concurrent stuff at times :) Are my concerns…

Erlang is about 10x slower than C++ on most examples. damned lies and benchmarks. hipe enabled? VM tuned properly? attempt to use halfword emulator? comparing C++ the compiler optimized down to SSE2 instructions to an emulator VM loop? How much slower is Ruby than C++? Ruby runs every startup in the world. This website is the home of "DO THINGS THAT DON'T SCALE" including using fast to write programming languages at…

Damned innuendo.

If you'd looked at that web page you'd know the answer to "hipe enabled?"

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#127

Post by querulous »

erlang's whole design is what OO promised but failed to deliver. it's completely trivial and natural to represent programs as a collection of loosely coupled state machines that communicate asynchronously. it turns out this is a fantastic model for anything network related but also for programming in general

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#130

Post by angersock »

dpeck wrote: post #107

I'm just starting to do some work on a system that is going to be very distributed with many endpoints, often on unreliable networks connecting back to a server. Erlang (elixir, really) looked promising for this so I've been investigating off and on while we do some prototyping and flesh out some of the details. So far it seems to be that you get nearly all the advantages of Erlang with running something like RabbitM…

I'd suggest reading up on Erlang and OTP ("Erlang and OTP In Action" is a good book) and then looking at Elixir. I think that it makes a little more sense to look at Erlang in its native habitat and then you'll get a better appreciation for the syntax sugar Elixir brings.
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