The Erlang Shell
medium.com
The Erlang Shell
1–10 of 62 posts
Re: The Erlang Shell
#2> As an Erlang programmer I often claim that “You can’t pick parts of Erlang and then claim you have the same functionality. It all comes together as a whole”.
I am guilty of this. I am relatively new to erlang programming and I have skipped on some of the features that make the language great. For instance I have neglected learning both supervision and hot code reloading.
Re: The Erlang Shell
#3FUCK erlang
Re: The Erlang Shell
#4Oh nice. They have now almost a Common Lisp environment. Getting closer to Greenspun's tenth rule.
Re: The Erlang Shell
#5> As an Erlang programmer I often claim that “You can’t pick parts of Erlang and then claim you have the same functionality. It all comes together as a whole”. I am guilty of this. I am relatively new to erlang programming and I have skipped on some of the features that make the language great. For instance I have neglected learning both supervision and hot code reloading.
Well you're relatively new :). It takes time to absorb an entire language's ecosystem. As long as you take it upon yourself to acquaint yourself with those features, things will be fine.
The biggest thing to get on your initial survey should be minimal awareness so you know that that feature exists when you encounter the problem it was originally built to solve.
Supervision though, is fundamental to OTP and Erlang. It's certainly easy to learn so I would consider that a low hanging fruit for you.
Hot code reloading is a consequence of the continuation passing style that is prevalent in every Erlang process and easy to understand too (although employing it in production can be a bit trickier).
Re: The Erlang Shell
#6> As an Erlang programmer I often claim that “You can’t pick parts of Erlang and then claim you have the same functionality. It all comes together as a whole”. I am guilty of this. I am relatively new to erlang programming and I have skipped on some of the features that make the language great. For instance I have neglected learning both supervision and hot code reloading.
Hot code reloading I'd personally grant you as an exception; it's a maintenance tool, not a development tool, and you can largely ignore it until you want it, if you're adhering to OTP principles.
Ignoring supervision, however, is...not wise, if you have -any- sort of reliability considerations (even ones as weak as "I'd prefer it to remain up"; if it's just a one off thing that you'll manually execute again if it fails, meh, fine).
Supervision is really, really easy to use, at least for the base use case (creating a good hierarchy, so that processes restart the other processes that should be restarted, is an architectural consideration that can be a bit hairy), and it's truly heartening to grep a log for something you've been running a while, find crashes that indicate issues you want to fix (even simple stuff, like sanitizing inputs), but the system is still running as though nothing happened.
Re: The Erlang Shell
#7I find it funny that the author willingly gave up static typing to have Erlang process control—I made the opposite switch as I grew tired of the overhead and attrition of modeling a complex domain in Erlang. I think the Erlang VM is easily my favorite place to live as a programmer, but I do with Erlang-the-language gave more.
Re: The Erlang Shell
#8Oh nice. They have now almost a Common Lisp environment. Getting closer to Greenspun's tenth rule.
Is it actually possible to do hot code reloading while preserving the state of the running system in Common Lisp? I'm genuinely curious, I kind of had this impression that it was a feature fairly unique to Erlang.
Re: The Erlang Shell
#9Oh nice. They have now almost a Common Lisp environment. Getting closer to Greenspun's tenth rule.
Is it actually possible to do hot code reloading while preserving the state of the running system in Common Lisp? I'm genuinely curious, I kind of had this impression that it was a feature fairly unique to Erlang.
An interesting example of Erlang hot code reloading in embedded system: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96UzSHyp0F8
Re: The Erlang Shell
#10I find it funny that the author willingly gave up static typing to have Erlang process control—I made the opposite switch as I grew tired of the overhead and attrition of modeling a complex domain in Erlang. I think the Erlang VM is easily my favorite place to live as a programmer, but I do with Erlang-the-language gave more.
What were your thoughts re: Dialyzer?