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How I fell in love with Erlang

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Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#21

Post by auggierose »

ctenb wrote: post #17
bargainbin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (mailbox = mailbox + message) is so simple! The author did not say this at all, they barely even touched on capabilities of erlang/OTP. Their focus was on the functional syntax of Erlang. > For instance, in head(sort(list)), will the whole list be sorted, or will the smallest element be returned? Your point isn’t clear. The functions have a clear nested call sequence, take a list, sort it, get the head. Also how is…

In Haskell with `head (sort list)` the entire list does not have to be sorted, depending on the sort implementation. Everything is lazy, so sort can sort the list just enough to return the smallest element.

Going beyond laziness, a compiler that can understand and exploit equations, could use `head (sort list) = smallest (list)` to make the program more efficient, going from O(n * log n) to O(n) complexity.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#22

Post by donatj »

> 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 personally always had a soft spot for languages like TI-BASIC that use a storage operator rather than overloading = so for example:

X + 1 -> X

I wonder if I should try a functional language with her.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#23

Post by christophilus »

tommica wrote: post #18
sam-cop-vimes wrote: post #11

I can totally relate to this. Programming in Erlang felt so natural compared to the knots I was twisting myself into writing C++. I was churning out C++ code, but wasn't having fun. Suddenly Erlang made it fun and programming became addictive.

> Suddenly Erlang made it fun and programming became addictive. I'm saying this with complete sincerity: WHAT IS IT THAT YOU PEOPLE SEE!? What is the fun? What are you addicted to? Typing and seeing the output? Solving a problem? I feel like I am missing out on some amazing life altering experience when I see people state that. The same thing I have with the article - what does it mean to love a programming language?

It’s a subjective thing, but when a language clicks for you, work becomes pleasant. You get into (and maintain) a flow state. It feels as if you’re crafting something beautiful and elegant and simple. It’s the same reason people love painting, drawing, or sculpting with one specific medium over an other. They just like the aesthetic and process better.

Also, some languages just really stink— slow compilation times, obscure errors, loads of footguns and require much more care and focus on things which are orthogonal to the problem you’re trying to solve.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#24

Post by sam-cop-vimes »

tommica wrote: post #18
sam-cop-vimes wrote: post #11

I can totally relate to this. Programming in Erlang felt so natural compared to the knots I was twisting myself into writing C++. I was churning out C++ code, but wasn't having fun. Suddenly Erlang made it fun and programming became addictive.

> Suddenly Erlang made it fun and programming became addictive. I'm saying this with complete sincerity: WHAT IS IT THAT YOU PEOPLE SEE!? What is the fun? What are you addicted to? Typing and seeing the output? Solving a problem? I feel like I am missing out on some amazing life altering experience when I see people state that. The same thing I have with the article - what does it mean to love a programming language?

I'll try and answer this.

Expressiveness: I could express a solution to a problem with very few lines of code and without the clutter of housekeeping operations like memory management.

Recursion: Erlang properly introduced me to recursion whereas I hadn't encountered it before. This is again related to expressiveness. There is something strangely beautiful about seeing a problem solved using recursion elegantly.

Message passing: when I was trying to figure out how Microsoft's C++ socket classes were implemented and I dug into the code, it turned out there was a hidden window for every socket created and messages were being passed to/from it, but message passing wasn't available anywhere in Visual C++ as a first class construct (at least as far as I remember it). I was overjoyed when I discovered that message passing was a first class citizen in Erlang and how much easier it was to implement concurrent programs than using native threads in C++.

Compared to OO programming in C++ where I was never sure whether I was using inheritance correctly, whether I needed inheritance at all, memory management, difficulty with threads, writing code in Erlang was a breeze.

And the whole support for distributed programming, hot code loading, list comprehensions! I fell in love again with Erlang when I discovered list comprehensions. Man, I could go on.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#25

Post by actionfromafar »

noir_lord wrote: post #12
jacquesm wrote: post #7

It's funny how HN goes through these Erlang cycles. It's a long standing tradition, starting off with 'Erlang Day': https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11 Erlang gets a lot of stuff right for scalable web based stuff, and even though there are many of its influences that have by now made it into other languages and eco systems it is still amazing to me that such a well thought out system is run with such i…

> You'll never see the people behind Erlang be confrontational or evangelists, they just do what they're good at and it is up to you whether you adopt it or not. The big open source projects where pretty much all like that in the past, in the 80's/90's/early 2000's - in that respect they feel like a pleasant anachronism before everything needed to be promoted/self-promotional influencer like, the users did the evange…

I think it's because we are wired that attention is it's own currency nowadays. And it's also true. Even if there's no paid product, you get strength in numbers. If you depend on an open source library, it's usually better for you if others depend on it too.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#26

Post by noosphr »

marceldegraaf wrote: post #9
jacquesm wrote: post #7

It's funny how HN goes through these Erlang cycles. It's a long standing tradition, starting off with 'Erlang Day': https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11 Erlang gets a lot of stuff right for scalable web based stuff, and even though there are many of its influences that have by now made it into other languages and eco systems it is still amazing to me that such a well thought out system is run with such i…

It's funny that you mention this, and it made me take some time to appreciate I've been working with Elixir full-time for almost 10 years now, and the entire experience has been so... stable. There's been little drama, the language is relatively stable, the community has always been there when you need them but aren't too pushy and flashy. It all feels mature and – in the best possible way – boring, and that is aweso…

I've moved from Linux to OpenBSD for this reason.

It's all so boring it's wonderful.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#27

Post by lionkor »

andoando wrote: post #10

My confusion here is it always seemed liked a simple mapping to take = to mean "make x equal to x+1" rather than "x is already equal to x+1". It is declaring a relationship, between the previous value and the current. One way or another, youre defining transformations. I mean even in the sum example, you see the statement "N is n-1" which is the exact same thing as x = x+1 with = swapped for "is"

That's why I like the

    x := x + 1
syntax better, or the

    let x = 2;
syntax

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#28

Post by noir_lord »

actionfromafar wrote: post #25
noir_lord wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'll never see the people behind Erlang be confrontational or evangelists, they just do what they're good at and it is up to you whether you adopt it or not. The big open source projects where pretty much all like that in the past, in the 80's/90's/early 2000's - in that respect they feel like a pleasant anachronism before everything needed to be promoted/self-promotional influencer like, the users did the evange…

I think it's because we are wired that attention is it's own currency nowadays. And it's also true. Even if there's no paid product, you get strength in numbers. If you depend on an open source library, it's usually better for you if others depend on it too.

Certainly an element of that but there are also cases where the superior product "lost" to the inferior product because the inferior one was better marketed.

So doing some level of promotion becomes necessary if you want users even when you have the better product - the superior product speaks for itself doesn't often apply any more.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#29

Post by sph »

jacquesm wrote: post #7

It's funny how HN goes through these Erlang cycles. It's a long standing tradition, starting off with 'Erlang Day': https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11 Erlang gets a lot of stuff right for scalable web based stuff, and even though there are many of its influences that have by now made it into other languages and eco systems it is still amazing to me that such a well thought out system is run with such i…

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.

For example, I've stepped into the world of game dev and Godot, which is fantastic and uses a regular object-oriented model. After trying to build a non-trivial desktop app with it, my thoughts are consumed by the fact that mutable state and object orientation is the silliest idea, and I'm speaking as someone that really got into Smalltalk and message-passing objects.

I don't even need actors and OTP, I just want some immutable data structures and functions operating on them. Erlang/Elixir are fantastic to build servers, but there is a sore lack of something closer to the metal within 80% the speed of a native language. I would build an entire operating system out of it. Why has no one put microkernels and Erlang into a blender? I know there's QNX, but it's still UNIX, not Erlang.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#30

Post by mrkeen »

andoando wrote: post #10

My confusion here is it always seemed liked a simple mapping to take = to mean "make x equal to x+1" rather than "x is already equal to x+1". It is declaring a relationship, between the previous value and the current. One way or another, youre defining transformations. I mean even in the sum example, you see the statement "N is n-1" which is the exact same thing as x = x+1 with = swapped for "is"

It's N1 is N - 1, not N is N-1
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