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Why the Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang [video]

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Re: Why the Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang [video]

#51

Post by mercurial »

zem wrote: post #28
mercurial wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My dream language is one with ML semantics running on top of BEAM. That seems like a natural progression for a platform that was designed to be reliable -- while there have been attempts to graft a more versatile type system onto the Erlang base language, the cleanest way forward seems to be a language purpose-built for the task. On the other hand, OCaml is pretty fast in most cases. BEAM doesn't have the same repu…

AliceML is worth a look, though development seems to have died out a few years ago :( http://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/alice/

This looks interesting. Once I find OCaml too mainstream, I'll have to look at it :)

Re: Why the Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang [video]

#52

Post by tokenrove »

RogerL wrote: post #24
themartorana wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an absolutely brilliant video[0] on Microsoft's Channel 9, called "Panel: Systems Programming in 2014 and Beyond" (with Charles Torre, Niko Matsakis, Andrei Alexandrescu, Rob Pike, and Bjarne Stroustrup), Rob Pike makes a comment (I'm paraphrasing) that in making Go, he realized that testing in general and the idea of TDD was due to dynamic languages not having any compile-time checking. The panel seemed to agree.…

Kent Beck invented TDD while programming in Smalltalk, having recalled reading a paper on using TDD with punched tape. I think Rob Pike is confused in his history/assertion.

I'm not sure why this invalidates his assertion -- Smalltalk is an extremely dynamic language with almost no ahead-of-time static analysis.

Re: Why the Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang [video]

#53

Post by saryant »

platz wrote: post #44
NotableAlamode wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typing a the message-passing part of a language like Erlang is very much an open research problem. I spoke about this at length with the session type community. They are thinking about this, but it's at least a decade away.

Isn't Akka planning to add types w/ typed akka? If they can pull that off some subset of Erlang should be doable as well

That's their plan for Akka 3.0. I believe this is the current status: https://github.com/akka/akka/pull/16665

Re: Why the Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang [video]

#54

Post by mercurial »

saosebastiao wrote: post #32
jallmann wrote: post #3

I tried to do a startup in Erlang a few years ago. Haven't been able to watch the video because there aren't subtitles or a transcript, but here is why I don't use Erlang anymore: the type system. Erlang/OTP does MANY things correctly, where "correctly" is taken to be "in line with my tastes", and yes this includes the inane issue of syntax. But the type system? Normally that wouldn't bother me, but I'm coming from O…

I'm in the same boat as far as dream languages go. But just out of curiosity, what is it about F# or Scala that you don't like? For me Scala is an amazing language that sacrificed what could have been a clean design for the sake of Java interop, while inheriting a bunch of the baggage of the Java ecosystem (no closures until recently, type erasure, needless boxing, etc). And F# is still a windows-first ecosystem, as…

> I'm currently using both, and while I like both of them well enough, I can't ever shake the feeling like I'm missing out on something better.

You'd probably like OCaml, considering how F# is basically "OCaml for .NET". And it definitely cannot be accused of having a "Windows-first" ecosystem.

Re: Why the Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang [video]

#55

Post by jacques_chester »

NotableAlamode wrote: post #38
jeffdavis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"while there have been attempts to graft a more versatile type system onto the Erlang base language, the cleanest way forward seems to be a language purpose-built for the task." Are you sure that's even possible? Erlang is fundamentally a dynamic system, with hot code (re)loading, processes starting and stopping (possibly crashing), and nodes attaching and detaching. Moreover, the idea that a message can be sent to a…

Typing a the message-passing part of a language like Erlang is very much an open research problem. I spoke about this at length with the session type community. They are thinking about this, but it's at least a decade away.

In practice you have to check messages as they arrive because you cannot control what others will send you.

Re: Why the Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang [video]

#56

Post by jacques_chester »

themartorana wrote: post #11
angersock wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely brilliant video. One of the best parts was when Pike brings up Erlang, and everyone just kind of mutters and looks down. I also like the part where Pike was like "Yeah, we statically verified the Plan 9 kernel somewhere, but nobody cared. :(" The important thing to note, though, was the thing they all agreed on: type systems don't magically replace tests, and don't magically save you from things when you'r…

I agree. Thank goodness they're not mutually exclusive! I happen to be a Go fan, and thankful testing is well supported in the language and tooling. After having worked heavily in both compiled and dynamic software environments, I do like having compile-time checks on stupid things like typos. All my love to Python, which we use heavily, but my, what some compilation-like tooling would save me. (Nim has really caught…

Chunky integration testing is supported. Fine-grained unit testing is ... so-so. If you have units that don't interact with the standard library you can pin down a lot of behaviour.

But if you touch the standard library, which in a systems language is going to happen a bit, then isolating your own code is basically impossible. You are stuck with integration testing only.

Mocking, faking, stubbing and whatnot frequently blow your feet off if you use them indiscriminately. But sometimes they are the best way to test code because you can perform controlled experiments with variables that you control. Go's standard library is riddled with physical structs that cannot be substituted for any kind of double.

Basically, they don't follow their own advice to interface all the things.

Re: Why the Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang [video]

#57

Post by crdoconnor »

asuffield wrote: post #46
crdoconnor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Compile time checking basically replaces a large chunk of unit tests one would have to write and maintain to cover the same issues. As does static analysis. You do use a ruby static analysis tool on your project, right?

The last ruby project that I worked on laughed at static analysis tools before pitching them into halting problems. You have to execute ruby code just to assemble the classes, it's quite resistant to static analysis unless you artificially restrict yourself to a subset of the language. If you're going to limit yourself to the statically checkable part of the language then you might as well just use a language that wa…

>If you're going to limit yourself to the statically checkable part of the language then you might as well just use a language that was designed for it.

Or not, because that would still catch misspelled variables (the problem the OP complained of), and running a static analysis tool a little bit easier than rewriting your entire project in a different language.

Re: Why the Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang [video]

#58

Post by phamilton »

asa400 wrote: post #18

Warning: wall of text ahead. My Erlang experience is admittedly hobbyist, and mostly as a consequence of working my way through Fred's excellent http://learnyousomeerlang.com/ and fooling around with side projects. As I see it, Erlang does a lot of cool stuff, at a semantic and systems level, but utterly fails when it comes to things like approachability and marketing. These topics are universal to all languages, so…

Regarding the repl, please connect to a running node and run etop:start().

That's pretty awesome in my opinion.

Re: Why the Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang [video]

#60

Post by wtetzner »

je42 wrote: post #19
Terr_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given a mutually exclusive choice, I'll take a strong test suite over a strong type system any day That's great as long as you'll only ever work on that one project. A test-suite yields benefits for one project, a type-system yields benefits for every project.

True, however. Test suits tests things that a type system never is able to test. In general, if you reach a non trivial size of code you have to have unit tests in order to stay productive and speedy at a high quality level. A type-system only speeds you up in the beginning.

Tests are code and need to be maintained. Type systems remove the need for certain classes of tests that would otherwise need to be written and maintained. Just because you need to write other unit tests doesn't mean it's free to write unit tests to check types.
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