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How I fell in love with Erlang

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Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#101

Post by galangalalgol »

jacquesm wrote: post #78
donatj wrote: post #22

> X equals X plus one? That’s not math. That’s a lie. That's really interesting... My wife, who has no real mathematical background had the EXACT same reaction when I was trying to teach her some simple programming. I tried to explain that equals in that context was more of a storage operator than a statement that said line is true. She found it very frustrating and we gave up on the endeavor shortly thereafter. I've…

This blocked me from understanding computer programming for 3 years. I thought of 'variables' as immutable and the fact that they were not didn't really click at all. Once I mentally transitioned from 'it's a label attached to a value' to 'it's a named box which holds a value' life got a lot easier. I was 15 when it finally clicked (on a TI programmable calculator...).

I wonder if haskell would have made more sense to you at the time with everything being immutable.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#102

Post by sodapopcan »

skydhash wrote: post #96
jacquesm wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think that Clojure was going to be the first FP language that was going to go mainstream but it seems to have fizzled. What went wrong?

FP language is very hard on novice programmers. You can write thousands of lines of bad javascript/java/python code, but you won’t write ten in FP without the whole thing blowing up. And then there’s the whole evaluation instead of instructions. With FP, you’re always thinking recursively. With imperative, you can coast on a line by line understanding.

In my experience it's still very possible to write many, many lines lines or utterly shit FP code, but I know what you're saying.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#103

Post by shanemhansen »

jacquesm wrote: post #76
sph wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's cycles, more like newcomers rediscovering the future. I've learned Elixir in 2016 after a lull in my interest in programming languages, and 9 years later it's still my favourite environment by a country mile. It's not the language per se, but the BEAM, the actor model, the immutability — just makes sense, and doing things the C/Rust/Javascript/Python way is like building bridges out of cardboard. F…

> Why has no one put microkernels and Erlang into a blender? I know there's QNX, but it's still UNIX, not Erlang. That's a very good question. There are some even lesser known dialects out there that do this but you are going to find it hard to get to the same level of feature completeness that Erlang offers out of the box. QNX and Erlang embody quite a few of the same principles, but QNX really tried hard to do this…

You nerd sniped me a little and I'll admit I'm not 100% sure what a reduction is but I've understood it to be a measurement of work for scheduling purposes.

A bit of googling indicates that actually you can use performance monitoring instur to generate an interrupt every n instructions. https://community.intel.com/t5/Software-Tuning-Performance/H...

Which is part of the solution. Presumably the remainder of the solution is then deciding what to schedule next in a way that matches erlang.

Disclaimer: this is based off some googling that makes it seem like hardware support the desired feature exists, not any actual working code.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#104

Post by sodapopcan »

SeanDav wrote: post #33
donatj wrote: post #22

> X equals X plus one? That’s not math. That’s a lie. That's really interesting... My wife, who has no real mathematical background had the EXACT same reaction when I was trying to teach her some simple programming. I tried to explain that equals in that context was more of a storage operator than a statement that said line is true. She found it very frustrating and we gave up on the endeavor shortly thereafter. I've…

It is not a lie it is just apparently familiar notation that actually has an entirely different meaning. It is not an equation, it is an assignment. X := X + 1 is perhaps less confusing, even if meaning the same thing.

Although in Erlang it's closer to an equation with assignment being a side effect. `=` is the pattern matching operator.

    Eshell V15.2.6 (press Ctrl+G to abort, type help(). for help)
    1> X = 1.
    1
    2> X = X.
    1
    3> 1 = X.
    1
    4> X = 2.
    ** exception error: no match of right hand side value 2
    5>

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#105

Post by jasperry »

donatj wrote: post #22

> X equals X plus one? That’s not math. That’s a lie. That's really interesting... My wife, who has no real mathematical background had the EXACT same reaction when I was trying to teach her some simple programming. I tried to explain that equals in that context was more of a storage operator than a statement that said line is true. She found it very frustrating and we gave up on the endeavor shortly thereafter. I've…

Am I wrong to be skeptical that this was a thought author had at 8 years old? I don't doubt that 8-year-olds can learn programming and advanced math, but even the brightest 8-year-old would still be in the "sponge" stage. It's hard to believe they would have a sufficiently fixed idea about algebra to be troubled that X = X + 1 is "wrong".

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#107

Post by brabel »

donatj wrote: post #22

> X equals X plus one? That’s not math. That’s a lie. That's really interesting... My wife, who has no real mathematical background had the EXACT same reaction when I was trying to teach her some simple programming. I tried to explain that equals in that context was more of a storage operator than a statement that said line is true. She found it very frustrating and we gave up on the endeavor shortly thereafter. I've…

Mutation should be an advanced topic in programming teaching. Even in procedural languages. It should be seen as an optimization technique you only use when analysis has shown that to be the only way to solve a difficult bottleneck. Using mutation as a basic tool in programming was a mistake.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#108

Post by codr7 »

ccortes wrote: post #94
mycall wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about OCAML, does that fill your needs?

I really want to get into ocaml but the syntax is sooo ugly I feel like you need a great IDE set up to be able to be productive with it.

Might want to check out ReasonML.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#109

Post by morshu9001 »

I used Erlang for a couple of years. It's cool and elegant for sure, but it always felt like it took longer to write than JS or Py like I'd otherwise use. Recursion with matchers is sometimes natural, sometimes roundabout to what you want to do.

The multiprocess stuff is cool too, but a premature optimization for what I was doing. If I needed to scale, I don't know if that'd be the chosen approach.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#110

Post by npteljes »

jacquesm wrote: post #80
npteljes wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pascal also had := for assignment, if I remember correctly. I disliked it, to be honest, = is pretty much universally accepted in the IT world to mean "assign to". I don't think this is something that keeps someone from programming. If it does, then the other 100000 hoops won't be better, every trade has its "why the fuck is this the way it is" moments. If you'd still try programming with her, I think you could start…

> I don't think this is something that keeps someone from programming. Not everybody is wired the same way. That exact thing happened to me, it was some kind of mental block. And when that fell away I found the rest of programming to be fairly easy.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I guess in a case like this, even trying another language can work.
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