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How I fell in love with Erlang

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Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#51

Post by fpoling »

davidsainez wrote: post #32
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 is difficult to understand the full beauty (or horror, depending on your pov) of functional programming with such a simple example. But as you scale up in complexity, it can be someone’s full time job to make sure the model is accurately translated to the computer’s memory. With a pure language, the compiler is responsible for maintaining the mapping to memory, so you (mostly) just focus on the symbolic relationsh…

Pure languages still use stack to store mutating state. In a single-threaded programs this is almost non-observable except for occasional stack overflow crashes. But with multiple threads and message passing one can emulate arbitrary state mutation just by using messages and stack.

Then I have found the code that is a heavy user of closures is harder to understand even if it is single-threaded and closures can pass arbitrary state even if the state is immutable.

What I have found useful is persistent data structures. Those really simplify modelling. But then those can be used in imperative languages as well.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#53

Post by knome »

petrzjunior wrote: post #35
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…

I think the question is whether sort should return a new, sorted array or whether it should sort the array in place. In functional languages it is the former, in imperative the latter.

It can be quite useful to have nondestructive sorting in imperative languages as well. Hence python introducing 'sorted' even though '.sort()' preceded it.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#54

Post by zwnow »

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…

For me it took a tremendous amount of work to somewhat understand the OTP stuff though. Its one of those languages where I can never be confident about my implementations, and thankfully it has features to check whether you have stale processes or whatever. A language I am humbled by whenever I use it.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#55

Post by knome »

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?

when I program, I am visualizing the machine I am building in my head. some language semantics are cleaner than others, allowing the bits and pieces to flow together more naturally, composing in elegant ways that do not require pointless effort be spent manually wrangling footguns and minutia.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#56

Post by macintux »

donatj wrote: post #22

> 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…

I've shared it here once recently, so might as well again.

I gave a talk at Midwest.io (sigh, such a great conference, shame it faltered) building Erlang from the ground up, starting with the = sign and the implications (side effects?) of it being a runtime assertion of truth in addition to a binding.

https://youtu.be/E18shi1qIHU

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#57

Post by pxc »

torben-friis wrote: post #47
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…

>somehow almost aggressive/corporate style even when there is no paid product. For those who collaborate with open source for political/ideological reasons (which does not need be the case), it makes sense to join the battle for attention. As long as the product isn’t compromised in the way, I think it’s very good to see open source influencers.

GNU Guix has a good blog, but I don't feel like they are very "marketing" focused.

It's hard to describe precisely, but a lot of free software projects do a good job of putting themselves out there in an unfussy way. There really is something refreshing and cozy about that.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#58

Post by macintux »

I discovered Erlang from Bruce Tate's book[0] and it was such an obviously pragmatic and interesting language that I started participating in the Twitter Erlang community, discovered Basho was using it for Riak and looking for a tech evangelist in the Midwest, and thus began my all-time favorite job.

I'm still more of a infrastructure guy than a software developer, but working with such incredibly smart people was a delight. Basho was good at hiring people who could learn Erlang (and, perhaps unsurprisingly, was almost entirely remote).

[0]: https://pragprog.com/titles/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven-...

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#59

Post by mycall »

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…

Does anyone know if matrix.org has any Erlang implementations? It seems like the perfect fit to me.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#60

Post by mycall »

sph wrote: post #29
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. F…

What about OCAML, does that fill your needs?
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