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OTP 23

erlang.org

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Re: OTP 23

#31

Post by Grimm1 »

dnautics wrote: post #12
Grimm1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in the same boat until discovering elixir/erlang it has by far been the most approachable functional language for me and it has been a gateway drug of sorts into experimenting with ocaml and various lisps. I personally think elixir is really special and an amazing fit for any project that needs high IO concurrency.

IMO erlang (and arguably even more, elixir) is "functional for the working programmer". It doesn't drown itself in academic abstractions, uses functional programming as a tool to guardrail you from mistakes (in the same way that C guards the programmer from making asm mistakes), with escape hatches that are battle-tested and justified based on decades of experience. I would say the only other functional language that…

Yeah I think that's a great way to frame it, historically one of the turn offs for me with FP was that it was overly academic when I am much more about how practical a tool the language is for what I'm trying to accomplish. Elixir was definitely the first FP that felt that way for me.

That said I have grown an appreciation for more esoteric languages and enjoy seeing the way they handle various problems it's just likely they'll never have a place in my toolkit.

Re: OTP 23

#32

Post by Grimm1 »

unvs wrote: post #11
Grimm1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in the same boat until discovering elixir/erlang it has by far been the most approachable functional language for me and it has been a gateway drug of sorts into experimenting with ocaml and various lisps. I personally think elixir is really special and an amazing fit for any project that needs high IO concurrency.

Agreed! I found learning Elixir to be a great gateway to learn Erlang as well. When I first tried learning Erlang (before Elixir was released), it became a bit too much to wrap my head around. It was a lot easier when I had gotten the fundamentals of FP down through Elixir, though!

Yes definitely, I would have never even bothered with Erlang before using Elixir and having it introduce me in a friendly way to Erlang, which is a shame because honestly the EVM and OTP are amazingly strong at what they both do.

Re: OTP 23

#33

Post by hinkley »

skrebbel wrote: post #27
moviedo wrote: post #5

I'm currently learning erlang/elixir and I'm really enjoying the language constructs. I had originally taken a Programming Language Paradigms class in college with racket, and I really didn't appreciate functional ideas(i.e. syntax is my excuse). I'm now a really big fan of functional language idioms. Anyone interested should try the futurelearn class, https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/functional-programming-e... .

I never understood why people rave so much about functional programming wrt Erlang/Elixir, when its functional programming is clearly only a means to an end (fast and safe message passing requires immutable data, which requires FP) and not a driving design goal in its own right. I mean, unlike in typical hard FP languages like Haskell or Elm, mutable state is rampant in your average Elixir app, it's just spread out a…

Practical tools often achieve that practicality by avoiding dogma.

Re: OTP 23

#34

Post by AlchemistCamp »

moviedo wrote: post #5

I'm currently learning erlang/elixir and I'm really enjoying the language constructs. I had originally taken a Programming Language Paradigms class in college with racket, and I really didn't appreciate functional ideas(i.e. syntax is my excuse). I'm now a really big fan of functional language idioms. Anyone interested should try the futurelearn class, https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/functional-programming-e... .

Interesting. Is FutureLearn something analogous to Coursera and edX?

Re: OTP 23

#35

Post by zeroc8 »

brudgers wrote: post #25
organicfigs wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wanted to work with Elixir for 5 years now. I attempted to go through The Pragmatic Programmer's Elixir textbook and couldn't make it through. This comment applies solely to me, I feel I didn't have the aptitude to pick up functional programming (and that's coming from someone who graduated in CS from a T3, had years of experience, and starting med school next month).

Since it's already been five years, it might be worth considering Erlang instead of Elixr. I'd recommend Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World . It was written by Joe Armstrong who designed Erlang and "sold" it internally across Ericsson to people who were not programmers. They were people who were using Erlang to solve some other problem. The paradigm of Erlang is message passing. The primary idiom is…

I've tried learning both and Erlang seems to be less magical and more consistent. That said, I wouldn't dare to start an important project in either language for the fear of getting stuck somewhere along the way. With Go, there are no such concerns, even though the language itself is by far less elegant.

Re: OTP 23

#36

Post by hinkley »

conradfr wrote: post #2

https://twitter.com/elixirlang/status/1260556559165292544 > Elixir v1.10.3 is fully compatible with Erlang/OTP 23.0 - so up to date Elixir users are ready to give it a try!

I'm curious what the short and long-term performance implications are for Elixir with OTP 23. Has anyone offered up opinions or benchmarks?

Re: OTP 23

#37

Post by hinkley »

ponyous wrote: post #4

Couple of times when somebody posted an OTP erlang update I had no clue what I was reading. Then I came back to HN and somebody broke down why some things are really useful/changed and it was mind blowing. Can some erlanger explain why you are excited about certain things from the update?

Erlang may be the sturgeon of the software world. It has survived since the Triassic and yet is somehow prized for specific use cases and discerning tastes.

It is nowhere near as ancient as sharks, nor as vicious, but it employs some new physiology, and can survive just as long.

But that was a very different world and it sticks out like an outsider, when really it's been there the whole time.

(sorry, this analogy got away from me a bit).

Re: OTP 23

#38

Post by nurettin »

skrebbel wrote: post #27
moviedo wrote: post #5

I'm currently learning erlang/elixir and I'm really enjoying the language constructs. I had originally taken a Programming Language Paradigms class in college with racket, and I really didn't appreciate functional ideas(i.e. syntax is my excuse). I'm now a really big fan of functional language idioms. Anyone interested should try the futurelearn class, https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/functional-programming-e... .

I never understood why people rave so much about functional programming wrt Erlang/Elixir, when its functional programming is clearly only a means to an end (fast and safe message passing requires immutable data, which requires FP) and not a driving design goal in its own right. I mean, unlike in typical hard FP languages like Haskell or Elm, mutable state is rampant in your average Elixir app, it's just spread out a…

I have a prototype system where I am passing over 100k msg/sec between a dozen backend services written in python (asyncio+redis) and I keep on wondering when my bottleneck will become functional programming and safe message passing by making copies. When will the madness end?

Re: OTP 23

#39

Post by waltfy »

Not mentioned in the link above but something super cool with this release is that

> CPU quotas are now taken into account when deciding the default number of online schedulers. > Thus, automatically making Erlang a good citizen in container environments where quotas are applied, such as docker with the --cpus flag.

Super happy about this!

Re: OTP 23

#40

Post by gmfawcett »

hinkley wrote: post #33
skrebbel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood why people rave so much about functional programming wrt Erlang/Elixir, when its functional programming is clearly only a means to an end (fast and safe message passing requires immutable data, which requires FP) and not a driving design goal in its own right. I mean, unlike in typical hard FP languages like Haskell or Elm, mutable state is rampant in your average Elixir app, it's just spread out a…

Practical tools often achieve that practicality by avoiding dogma.

"Dogmatic" is a great description of OTP, though. You have to adopt the OTP mindset, adhere to the OTP principles, and organize your architecture in the OTP style. There's a long initiation process where you learn esoteric vocabulary, become familiar with bespoke tooling, etc.

This isn't meant as criticism -- I think Erlang/OTP is a brilliant piece of work. But arguably Erlang/OTP is a practical tool that achieved practicality by embracing dogma.

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