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Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

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Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

#171

Post by taybin »

theophrastus wrote: post #28
taybin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erlang is much easier than Haskell. Haskell breaks my mind, but Erlang is easy-peasy.

I have picked up my copy of "Real World Haskell" (Bryan O'Sullivan et.al) about three times; each time ended up nearly starting over and each time making it about ten pages or so more in, (i guess it's a recursive language at several levels). It's a fascinating approach, but egads, it requires a thousand fold more effort to get into than any other language i've learned. somewhere between the monads and the syntax..[h…

I like Real World Haskell a lot. The chapters on how to do real work like parsing audio files was fascinating to me. Too many functional language books seem to get hung up on the mechanisms like partials and reducing, but not on how I should use them with stateful tasks.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

#173

Post by albemuth »

iqster wrote: post #54

I'm seriously thinking about Erlang now. What raised my eyebrows was "2-3 million concurrent connections on a single FreeBSD box"[this is what WhatsApp achieved]. Async network IO can be done with library support in Python, natively in nodeJS, etc. I wonder if one can push those stacks to this level.

> concurrent connections on a single FreeBSD box

Do you have a source for that? I'd love to read more

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

#174

Post by rvirding »

hapless wrote: post #164
rvirding wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and you will end up reimplementing a lot of what is already in Erlang and most likely not as well either. Virding's 1st rule.

This is true, but it misses the point: Erlang is missing enough things that this fellow would rather rewrite OTP in Lua than deal with Erlang. e.g. string handling

From personal experience implementing the string handling is trivial compared to implementing the system side of Erlang. Get real.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

#178

Post by [deleted] »

jerf wrote: post #95
waffle_ss wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides the issues that jerf mentioned, Erlang also has per-process garbage collection built right into the VM. Last time I checked Go's garbage collection was still stop-the-world, mark-and-sweep, making it less suitable for soft real-time systems than Erlang.

"Go 2.0" probably can't ever quite fix that, but there's some potential for improvement; one can imagine as an optimization the compiler being able to determine a particular goroutine really is isolated (no shared state with anything else at start time, communicates only via channels that are full copiers of state, etc.) and independently GC's them, and also excludes them from the "stop" in the "stop the world". But…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

#179

Post by azth »

jerf wrote: post #16

Honestly, I think what kills it is that it's not an Algol-descended language [1]. If Erlang was written with an Algol-esque syntax it would have taken off years ago. But instead it has this weird syntax, which it then doesn't really do that much with. What do I mean by that? Haskell has a radically different syntax, but it does things with that syntax and its pervasive currying to enable a powerful succinctness that…

Out of curiosity, have you checked out Rust?

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

#180

Post by mml »

gcb0 wrote: post #69
Luc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on. Not exactly a good faith effort, is it? Why type in a rant like this, when you could have found a wonderful tutorial on Google in one tenth of the time it took you to write this?

100% of erlang tutorials are for fibonnaci.

I once challenged Scott Fritchie to give an Erlang talk at our local ruby group (rum.mn) without implementing Eratosthenes' sieve, and sure enough he did, using elevators of all things.

I was so impressed with Erlang that i'm still banging my head on it nearly 10 (half-hearted) years later.

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