Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang • Hacker News Board

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#101

Post by dizzystar » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 7:41 PM UTC

If I'm interpreting these slides correctly, I see an interesting bit of irony as a Clojure programmer. I can't tell you how many times I've been asked about my opinions of Erlang and I've lost count of how many times I've been told to learn Erlang because company X needs Erlang, or I should learn about scaling NoSQL databases, or whatever perception.

As far as I can tell, Erlang may not have a visible mind-share, but it has a much higher impact on mind-share and companies than it appears. Of course, this may just because many people consider Erlang / Haskell / Clojure languages that solve similar problems and are thus diametrically opposed to each other.

One person told me about how he asked a bunch of Haskellers about Erlang. Their answer: "Why would we learn a language no one uses?"

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#102

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 7:52 PM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #20

hershel wrote: post #11

Since there are actor libraries like akka targeting the JVM and claiming to offer similar benefits, why should someone prefer erlang?

Erlang is not just classes with a thread and a queue attached to it. Anyone can do it. It is also fault tolerance. How many of the actor libraries support creating large number of processes that have isolate heaps? How many have completely concurrent and pause-less garbage collectors? The closer abstraction is probably OS processes + IPC. Then you get closer to the spirit of it. And Chrome browser and other software…

> The closer abstraction is probably OS processes + IPC.

The closer abstraction is probably more like a distributed fault tolerant OS + processes using network transparent IPC.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#103

Post by coldtea » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 8:00 PM UTC

judk wrote: post #41

CmonDev wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can an open free Q&A site be concentrated on something? It simply reflects what people want and need.

Because Joel Spolsky is a famous Microsoftie whose community and fan base originally skewed toward Microsoft.

So? What percentage of those were (and is) in StackOverflow?

Compared to whole languages communities, for languages like PHP, Java, etc (and .NET), the number of "people who follow Spolsky and started using SO because of that" is miniscule. A statistical noise at best.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#104

Post by coldtea » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 8:02 PM UTC

quarterwave wrote: post #84

Are Erlang-based start-ups more likely to be acquired because Erlang has gained a Jedi Knight reputation for "sorcerer's ways"?

No, business doesn't work that way. And nobody much cares what you startup runs on if he's to part with his money basically.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#105

Post by coldtea » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 8:03 PM UTC

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #8

DiabloD3 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took 5 minutes for me to read, its actually really short.

Its not a matter of time taken. Having to swipe/scroll/space/key to read 1 new sentence, 130 times, really sucks.

Yeah, the humanity. 130 cliks of a key. That's like torture...

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#106

Post by digitalzombie » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 8:34 PM UTC

Joeboy wrote: post #6

I would think that the "Hard to find developers" takeaway was a pretty good incentive for developers to start learning erlang.

Yeah... about that.

I monkey around with Erlang you know where the jobs are? Silicon Valley and Miami.

I couldn't find much Erlang anywhere in Sol Cal. There are jobs description that have Erlang in there but they put that only as an example of a functional language skill set they want.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#107

Post by digitalzombie » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 8:41 PM UTC

hershel wrote: post #11

Since there are actor libraries like akka targeting the JVM and claiming to offer similar benefits, why should someone prefer erlang?

The scheduler is preemptive. JVM doesn't have a preemptive scheduler so there are many situation where this is a huge plus.

Erlang's process are just threads pretending to be process which will spawn much faster than Akka.

I believe there are a few articles of Akka actor limitation versus Erlang's. I haven't delve deep into this but there are caveat with receiving message and how to handle it versus Erlang not having such caveat.

Coding in a language that isn't built with Actor/Concurrency in mind is a huge pain in the butt. Think of Javascript and Node.js and callback hells, which of course have push Javascript to adopt things such as future and etc..

Of course you can say Scala is built with concurrency in mind same with Clojure. But the underlying gears, the JVM was not compares to Erlang.

There are trade off between Erlang's VM and Java's VM. And if your requirement is a perfect match for either Erlang and Java you mind as well pick the best because coding against what the tool was intended for is just for people who enjoy pain and frustration.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#108

Post by cpncrunch » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 9:07 PM UTC

dnissley wrote: post #10

mooism2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on a tablet, couldn't work out how to page through it.

Swipe right or left

Not on ipad...at least not reliably.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#109

Post by orclev » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 9:09 PM UTC

philsnow wrote: post #93

to3m wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming this isn't supposed to be rhetorical - yes, it works pretty well in fact. Windows's bizarrely ropey FS performance means it's a bit slower, but in general the experience is basically the same as using it under OS X. SourceTree/git gui/gitk are work the same.

It may be now (I'll take your word for it), but for the longest time, "windows support" was one of the only selling points anybody could provide for choosing mercurial over git (the other being some people prefer mercurial's branching/tagging to git's). So, if git didn't work fine on windows for a long time, there would be plenty of time for network effects to entrench github as a non-windows site, and indeed that is…

Open source on Windows (and thus github usage) in general seems to be something of a second class citizen. There's Cygwin of course which brings you a lot of the open source tools, but it's far more common for Windows apps to be closed source it seems. Linux of course due to its nature tends to favor open source apps quite heavily, but it would be interesting to compare how many apps are closed vs. open on OS X as compared to Windows.

Re: Why The Cool Kids Don't Use Erlang

#110

Post by orclev » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 9:17 PM UTC

disputin wrote: post #13

Does that RedMonk chart not show that it is fairly cool? You have C# and Java at the top - I wouldn't call them cool, widespread, not cool. It's above, on both axes Arduino, Dart, TypeScript. It's in the vicinity of Clojure, Go, CoffeeScript.

I think the "cool kids" part of this is somewhat rhetorical. The whole point of the slides is basically what are the deficiencies of Erlang, and how can we fix them. The results are fairly interesting although not entirely surprising.

It's also worth considering that these questions were asked of Erlang users, so it's the communities opinion of itself. I as an outsider would say my biggest issue with Erlang is that it's a highly event driven system and I don't like event based systems. Events are basically a more opaque form of GOTO and thus suffer the same criticisms. Events are sometimes the simplest way to model something, but as a general paradigm to solve all problems they really suck and do terrible things to your program architecture.