I can totally relate to this. Programming in Erlang felt so natural compared to the knots I was twisting myself into writing C++. I was churning out C++ code, but wasn't having fun. Suddenly Erlang made it fun and programming became addictive.
How I fell in love with Erlang
11–20 of 263 posts
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#12It's funny how HN goes through these Erlang cycles. It's a long standing tradition, starting off with 'Erlang Day': https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11 Erlang gets a lot of stuff right for scalable web based stuff, and even though there are many of its influences that have by now made it into other languages and eco systems it is still amazing to me that such a well thought out system is run with such i…
> You'll never see the people behind Erlang be confrontational or evangelists, they just do what they're good at and it is up to you whether you adopt it or not.
The big open source projects where pretty much all like that in the past, in the 80's/90's/early 2000's - in that respect they feel like a pleasant anachronism before everything needed to be promoted/self-promotional influencer like, the users did the evangelism but the creators where usually much more chill.
Obviously the vast majority of open source projects are still like that but there is definitely a lot more in your face promotion of things that feels different somehow almost aggressive/corporate style even when there is no paid product.
Not knocking the ones who do it, if it's open source they can sing it from a mountain top for all I care, the license it's under matters more.
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#13It's funny how HN goes through these Erlang cycles. It's a long standing tradition, starting off with 'Erlang Day': https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11 Erlang gets a lot of stuff right for scalable web based stuff, and even though there are many of its influences that have by now made it into other languages and eco systems it is still amazing to me that such a well thought out system is run with such i…
It's funny that you mention this, and it made me take some time to appreciate I've been working with Elixir full-time for almost 10 years now, and the entire experience has been so... stable. There's been little drama, the language is relatively stable, the community has always been there when you need them but aren't too pushy and flashy. It all feels mature and – in the best possible way – boring, and that is aweso…
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Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#14It's funny how HN goes through these Erlang cycles. It's a long standing tradition, starting off with 'Erlang Day': https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11 Erlang gets a lot of stuff right for scalable web based stuff, and even though there are many of its influences that have by now made it into other languages and eco systems it is still amazing to me that such a well thought out system is run with such i…
I am just wondering when the next "We-Love-Haskell" cycle is going to start!
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#15The hyperbole that Haskellers invoke around pure-functional vs impure is that you're never quite sure whether a function call you make will "fire the missiles". It's colourful language, but it's just a stand-in for other properties you might care about. For instance, in head(sort(list)) , will the whole list be sorted, or will the smallest element be returned? In atomically(doThis(); doThat()) , will doThis be 100% r…
> (mailbox = mailbox + message) is so simple!
The author did not say this at all, they barely even touched on capabilities of erlang/OTP. Their focus was on the functional syntax of Erlang.
> For instance, in head(sort(list)), will the whole list be sorted, or will the smallest element be returned?
Your point isn’t clear. The functions have a clear nested call sequence, take a list, sort it, get the head.
Also how is it any different than Haskells `head (sort list)`?
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#16I think the older programmer was hinting at gauss's formula with the summing 1 to 10 without using a loop? Recursion is also a loop in some sense.
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#17The hyperbole that Haskellers invoke around pure-functional vs impure is that you're never quite sure whether a function call you make will "fire the missiles". It's colourful language, but it's just a stand-in for other properties you might care about. For instance, in head(sort(list)) , will the whole list be sorted, or will the smallest element be returned? In atomically(doThis(); doThat()) , will doThis be 100% r…
> (mailbox = mailbox + message) is so simple! The author did not say this at all, they barely even touched on capabilities of erlang/OTP. Their focus was on the functional syntax of Erlang. > For instance, in head(sort(list)), will the whole list be sorted, or will the smallest element be returned? Your point isn’t clear. The functions have a clear nested call sequence, take a list, sort it, get the head. Also how is…
In Haskell with `head (sort list)` the entire list does not have to be sorted, depending on the sort implementation. Everything is lazy, so sort can sort the list just enough to return the smallest element.
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#18I can totally relate to this. Programming in Erlang felt so natural compared to the knots I was twisting myself into writing C++. I was churning out C++ code, but wasn't having fun. Suddenly Erlang made it fun and programming became addictive.
> Suddenly Erlang made it fun and programming became addictive.
I'm saying this with complete sincerity: WHAT IS IT THAT YOU PEOPLE SEE!? What is the fun? What are you addicted to? Typing and seeing the output? Solving a problem?
I feel like I am missing out on some amazing life altering experience when I see people state that. The same thing I have with the article - what does it mean to love a programming language?
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#19Unrelated to the topic, but I really like the feature `> cd ..` at the bottom of the article. It's simple and accessible even with a smartphone. I wonder if there is an easter egg inside.
Because the homepage has this "interactive terminal" which is funny and nice (kudos for readline shortcut support) but also partially "broken", i.e. the blog post(s) and other links you see with "ls" are not clickable, at least on Firefox.
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#20I can totally relate to this. Programming in Erlang felt so natural compared to the knots I was twisting myself into writing C++. I was churning out C++ code, but wasn't having fun. Suddenly Erlang made it fun and programming became addictive.
> Suddenly Erlang made it fun and programming became addictive. I'm saying this with complete sincerity: WHAT IS IT THAT YOU PEOPLE SEE!? What is the fun? What are you addicted to? Typing and seeing the output? Solving a problem? I feel like I am missing out on some amazing life altering experience when I see people state that. The same thing I have with the article - what does it mean to love a programming language?
Solving problems I guess. Have you used painful languages before? Imagine doing that, then discovering one that wasn't getting in your way all the time. It's easier to do things that are difficult in other languages. You can do so much on the BEAM, and you don't have to waste your time with thread pools or other nonsense.