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Ten Years of Erlang

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Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#111

Post by mononcqc »

tabtab wrote: post #103
mononcqc wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blog post is not actually about making FP accessible to the masses nor a how to guide about it, and if you read through the post, it’s even stated in there that it’s not important for the language to gain widespread use. That’s why I downvoted you. It’s not because of your opinion, it’s because it’s probably not in the right thread.

Actually, I'm not fully sure what the author's main point is. If I had to write a short summary based on my best guess, it would be: "I'm disappointed Erlang didn't catch on more, but the general programming & architectural lessons I learned from using it were still worth the effort". Is that clearly a wrong interpretation? My post relates to measuring "worth" here, and to the reasons why it probably didn't catch on.

I'm the author.

I'm not really disappointed Erlang didn't catch on more. As I said in the post, I wanted to take a bit of time to reflect over most of that decade, the ladder of ideas, and things that changed.

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#113

Post by tabtab »

mononcqc wrote: post #111
tabtab wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I'm not fully sure what the author's main point is. If I had to write a short summary based on my best guess, it would be: "I'm disappointed Erlang didn't catch on more, but the general programming & architectural lessons I learned from using it were still worth the effort". Is that clearly a wrong interpretation? My post relates to measuring "worth" here, and to the reasons why it probably didn't catch on.

I'm the author. I'm not really disappointed Erlang didn't catch on more. As I said in the post, I wanted to take a bit of time to reflect over most of that decade, the ladder of ideas, and things that changed.

Re: I'm the author.

Gulp!

I suppose I was looking for a few key ideas/themes as a summary the way we are taught to create and seek out in college writing courses, typically "essay style" you could say. Habit. Instead, it's more of a collection of relatively indendent notes.

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#114

Post by chessturk »

niftich wrote: post #14

It's a gem of an observation that newcomers to an environment often only make it to the first few rungs of the system complexity / actualization ladder. Once you look, you see this everywhere, and not just in IT but with any sort of design exercise or institutional process, any complex system that's full of Chesterton's fences, and people will either evolve to debate their rationale from a position of experience, or…

> people who've sought out similar model for its benefits, and could thrive with an offering that pays attention to these concerns throughout.

I discovered BEAM while looking into a way to run concurrent, distributed Golang/gRPC services in a supervisor-worker set up. I've continued tinkering with OTP ever since.

Edit: added quoted portion.

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#115

Post by ch4s3 »

andykx wrote: post #106
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why people think Elixir is like Ruby. Other than some syntactic similarities, I can't think of any substantial similarities.

A lot of the tooling is Ruby-like. Phoenix and Rails are very similar as well. They do have some major fundamental differences though and I think the similarity is often overstated.

Phoenix is similar to Rails superficially, I’m so far as they both have some MVCish structure and some generators. The similarities really stop there though.

Phoenix doesn’t have a magical asset pipeline, it doesn’t have a whole library of language extensions a la ActiveSupport, it doesn’t represent dB rows as objects. Those are just a few things off the top of my head.

Additionally all requests to an app running Phoenix/Cowboy/Plug are separate processes and can happen in parallel without having to stand up multiple app instances.

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#116

Post by dlcmh »

tombert wrote: post #24
GuiA wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand you and OP correctly, it’s a kind of joy derived from doing something for a while, being acutely aware of the limitations and frustrations that come with it, and then discovering a brand new way of working that doesn’t involve any of the slog you’d grown accustomed to. Speaking purely personally, mathematics has consistently been the discipline that’s delivered the most bang for my buck in that regard…

You did understand me correctly :). I agree with mathematics; I came to the same conclusion about five years ago; I realized understanding some basic type theory made a whole lot of programming easier for me. It's kind of dry reading, but I've been trying to get into different process calculi lately; specifically the Pi Calculus and Join Calculus, since these things feel like a cool hybrid of computer-science and mat…

Insightful! Any process calculus or type theory literature to recommend? Found https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/12d9/eae1638729aeb237b5be44... while googling - would this be a good place to start?

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#117

Post by ch4s3 »

justin66 wrote: post #97
reallydude wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what could be changed in the ecosystem to support this goal? 1. Change the syntax. Elixir wasn't far enough. Not at all and BEAM doesn't need to know, so we have a chicken-egg problem of people entrenched don't want to spend time that will help the language and underlying strategies become more widely adopted. Perhaps this was the production feedback loop you were referencing. We still don't have a good methodology…

> Handling text is still awful in these languages. In contrast to what? Honestly just curious.

You can do really cool stuff with SNOBOL[1] or TRAC. Really any homoiconic Lang or lisp will do great things with text. But I think Elixir handles text just fine if it’s UTF-8.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#118

Post by ryeguy »

hartator wrote: post #60
Jedi72 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work with Ruby and Elixir daily and Elixir is 10x faster. Phoenix recently added functionality to display response times in microseconds, partially as a showcase for its good performance. I dont doubt you can get more performance in C++ or something but its still lighting compared to Ruby.

Phoenix is faster than Rails, however Ruby is faster than Elixir when doing CPU intensive tasks. Like parsing text.

The "computer language benchmarks game" does not support this. Erlang is more than 2x faster than Ruby in cpu intensive tasks across their benchmarks.

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#119

Post by dnautics »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #102
empath75 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you want that kind of joy with erlang, try elixir. it's basically ruby on the erlang vm.

I don't get why people think Elixir is like Ruby. Other than some syntactic similarities, I can't think of any substantial similarities.

> I don't get why people think Elixir is like Ruby. Other than some syntactic similarities, I can't think of any substantial similarities.

The creators of elixir were rubyists. As someone who used to Ruby and now Elixirs, a lot of the joy of the platform (relevant to gp's comment) has made it over. Elixir is legitimately as fun to program in as Ruby, if not more so. I think that the developers of elixir care about the user experience in a way that basically no other language seems to.

I could of course be biased because before Ruby I used to program in an actor-like C++ framework, so everything just feels like I'm coming home to a home I never knew existed to me.

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#120

Post by Jailbird »

chessturk wrote: post #114
niftich wrote: post #14

It's a gem of an observation that newcomers to an environment often only make it to the first few rungs of the system complexity / actualization ladder. Once you look, you see this everywhere, and not just in IT but with any sort of design exercise or institutional process, any complex system that's full of Chesterton's fences, and people will either evolve to debate their rationale from a position of experience, or…

> people who've sought out similar model for its benefits, and could thrive with an offering that pays attention to these concerns throughout. I discovered BEAM while looking into a way to run concurrent, distributed Golang/gRPC services in a supervisor-worker set up. I've continued tinkering with OTP ever since. Edit: added quoted portion.

Did you find anything for the golang part?
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