Ten Years of Erlang • Hacker News Board

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#121

Post by carapace » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 2:30 AM UTC

tabtab wrote: post #101

carapace wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there, I sometimes try to help normals relate to me by asking, "You know Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory? I'm like a stupid, slighty-less-social-idiot Sheldon Cooper." I identify with Dr. Cooper. (BTW it sucks being like that. Don't ever think we do it because we like it. There are a few perks but it mostly sucks. Also, it's like living in "Idiocracy". I can't watch that movie because it's too painful. That's…

Re: "Anyhow, from my POV the "average" programmers should GTFO and stop peeing in the pool. I would fire 90% of working programmers. They're not needed and actively counter-productive." This is the theory that the elite are so productive that they can replace say 10 non-elites. The main problem with this is that most problems to be automated (or upgraded) are not well-defined. It takes iterative interaction with anal…

I upvoted you because you're making good points, and graciously. Well met, sorry for being cranky.

> This is the theory that the elite are so productive that they can replace say 10 non-elites.

No no no, I'm saying that the non-elites are counter-productive, that they contribute negative productivity.

(FWIW, I've met at least one "10x" in real life. He made his mark out of Uni by co-founding a company that made their own self-configuring ("Autonomous OS") box that really worked. Sold to IBM.)

> If you could find a domain having clearly-defined specs, then you could implement that 10x Elite Theory and crush the competition by cranking out software for a fraction of the traditional competitions' price.

People do that. Have you heard of Kdb? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kdb%2B

Now check out arcfide's "AMA: Explaining my 750 line compiler+runtime designed to GPU self-host APL" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13797797

Reflect that that was two years ago.

Try to imagine what the world would be like if all core software was written by ~100 people like Arthur Whitney or arcfide.

The whole "Trusted Compute Base" could fit in ~100 pages of code or less. Crystalline mathematical purity...

The rest of us would be writing macros. Sad? Maybe. But the machines would work.

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#122

Post by parentheses » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 2:41 AM UTC

This is a fantastic article.

A question for rubyists out there: what does the "ladder of ideas" for ruby look like?

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#123

Post by parentheses » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 2:45 AM UTC

unixhero wrote: post #18

tombert wrote: post #9

I love Erlang, and am one of the very few people who (in the past) managed to find work doing it full time. The actor paradigm it provides is surprisingly simple and elegant to write an app, even on a single node, and of course making distributed apps is fairly straightforward as a result of it. I have found that I like Lisp-Flavoured-Erlang (LFE) a bit more, since I still find the prolog-esque syntax a bit frustrati…

Not being facetious, but could the joy resemble the fun I associate with developing with Ruby?

I'll re-ask in this subtree. What does the "ladder of ideas" look like for ruby? [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20388593

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#124

Post by yawaramin » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 3:01 AM UTC

ngrilly wrote: post #23

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.

What Phoenix did to improve display response times that much?

Compiled routes https://elixirforum.com/t/phoenix-routing-is-fast/17782

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#125

Post by yawaramin » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 3:06 AM UTC

melling wrote: post #5

bfrog wrote: post #2

Interestingly enough I started using Erlang around the same time and while I've continued to use it for the project I started then on and off, I've not had a lot of reason to use it on other projects. I don't ever think it'll be as wide spread or as popular for many of the reasons listed. I do think it will continue to be a tool used to create great projects with very few hands. In the right hands and for the right p…

If you search HN history, it appears Elixir seems to get much more buzz. Saw this from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20357055 Elixir is just a slightly changed Erlang syntax?

Elixir has a homoiconic syntax and hygienic macros, like a Lisp. In fact much of the user-facing syntax of Elixir is just macro definitions. You can do a lot of things with it at compile time, and people take advantage of it to do really cool things like compile Phoenix routes down into a single static dispatching function so that requests can be routed quickly.

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#126

Post by grzm » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 3:12 AM UTC

yawaramin wrote: post #125

melling wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you search HN history, it appears Elixir seems to get much more buzz. Saw this from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20357055 Elixir is just a slightly changed Erlang syntax?

Elixir has a homoiconic syntax and hygienic macros, like a Lisp. In fact much of the user-facing syntax of Elixir is just macro definitions. You can do a lot of things with it at compile time, and people take advantage of it to do really cool things like compile Phoenix routes down into a single static dispatching function so that requests can be routed quickly.

Could you expand on what you mean by Elixir being homoiconic? That doesn’t seem readily apparent to me, and is contradicted by posts such as http://www.petecorey.com/blog/2017/08/07/what-if-elixir-were...

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#127

Post by pickledish » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 4:03 AM UTC

tabtab wrote: post #88

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #25

"But the vast majority of them will be a continuous flow of serial early adopters who surf from tech to tech, sniffing the best opportunity to gain a competitive advantage by being first to use a type of framework, language, or toolkit." - Oh god, that hit me so hard.

What's the common slang for that? "Buzzword Surfer"?

I've heard it referred as a "magpie developer":

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-magpie-developer/

though that's less for a competitive advantage and more because new tech is shiny

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#128

Post by fulafel » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 4:42 AM UTC

tabtab wrote: post #87

Functional programming has too long of a learning curve to the average programmer. A language should be judged by how long it takes average programmers to become proficient in it, not the "Sheldon Cooper" types. In typical medium and large organizations, it's difficult keep being selective about programmer hiring. (There are org structural/political reasons that would take several paragraphs to explain.) This problem…

I think the current research on learnability doesn't come out quite this way. People are quite ok with declarative formulas, consider eg the popularity of spreadsheet programs among non-programmers. But people who learned imperative programming first need mental work to switch.

There are lots of things that were tried and retried for decades before they caught on, which are now standard. For example look at the 90s when Java and Python came around - GC and memory safety were radical ideas for the industry where C/C++ were standard, even though they had been around in various languages for decades.

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#129

Post by tombert » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 4:51 AM UTC

dlcmh wrote: post #116

tombert wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm still learning, but I've really enjoyed this book [1]. It's pretty theory-heavy, especially at first, but overall I have found it fairly approachable.

Also, Tony Hoare's book on CSP is actually a fairly interesting read; certainly interesting if you like Go. You can actually download it legally free here: [2]

In regards to type theory, I'd recommend starting by learning Haskell, just to make the terminology a little less scary, then picking up the book "Basic Simple Type Theory" by J Roger Hindley. Don't let the name fool you, it's still pretty heavy stuff; there's no way I would have been able to get through it if I hadn't learned Haskell beforehand. [3]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Distributed-Computing-Sys...

[2] http://usingcsp.com/

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Cambridge-Theoretical-Computer...

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#130

Post by perlgeek » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 5:46 AM UTC

So, what's the quickest way to get into OTP?

To me it looks like Erlang itself isn't all that interesting, and OTP is where all the fun and magic is.