71–80 of 263 posts
> “How can you sum the numbers from 1 to 10 without using a loop?” Sum = n(n+1)/2
Yeah, I assume it's missing some context that the numeric solution was off the table.
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 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.
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…
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…
That's a very good question. There are some even lesser known dialects out there that do this but you are going to find it hard to get to the same level of feature completeness that Erlang offers out of the box.
QNX and Erlang embody quite a few of the same principles, but QNX really tried hard to do this at the OS process level in a way that destroyed a lot of the advantages that doing the same under Erlang would have. I think the main obstacle is the fact that the CPU does not support reductions natively. Maybe you could take it a step further and design an FPGA CPU that implements the core features of Erlang at the hardware level?
That would be an absolutely awesome project. Usually when you can think of it someone has already done it so a bit of googling would be a good way to start with that.
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…
Nice write up. Thank you for taking time to evangelize it.
> 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…
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 what has changed mainly is that today we have tools, languages and entire ecosystems that exist only as means to support someone’s product line. Take Swift for example. A giant gatekeeper of a corp decided to make it the only (reasonable) way to build apps and so it exists, powered by countless indie developers constantly creating content around it. Would Swift be a thing without everyone being forced to use…
Last time I worked with it it felt very sluggish and buggy though, in theory building UI elements with SwiftUI is great, in practice it was slow and needed to restart very often, and that was with simple components.
> 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…
Pascal also had := for assignment, if I remember correctly. I disliked it, to be honest, = is pretty much universally accepted in the IT world to mean "assign to". I don't think this is something that keeps someone from programming. If it does, then the other 100000 hoops won't be better, every trade has its "why the fuck is this the way it is" moments. If you'd still try programming with her, I think you could start…
Not everybody is wired the same way. That exact thing happened to me, it was some kind of mental block. And when that fell away I found the rest of programming to be fairly easy.