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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?

#71

Post by benmmurphy »

i find messaging between processes and handle exits can be a bit awkward as well.

for example if you send a message to a process there is no way to know whether it actually received the message or not. if you wait for a reply from the process then you can tell if the process received your message AND processed it but sometimes you only want to do the first for performance as well as semantic reasons. for example you may not want to retry sending a message that has crashed a process. i think this is because erlang wants to be network transparent and with the network you obviously can't be 100% sure whether your message was received or not.

handling exit()s is a bit weird as well. you get a message which is like {'EXIT', pid_that_called_exit_or_the_pid_you_are_linked_to}. so you need to know who would call exit() on you to handle exits correctly (OTP assumes only your parent will call exit on you) or assume that you will know all your linked pids correctly at all times and if you get an exit for a pid that is not linked then assume it is for you. i think it would much cleaner if there was a way to differentiate between an EXIT from a linked pid and an EXIT from yourself.

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

#72

Post by chaostheory »

For me it was lists for strings, something both basic and that I know I'd run into a lot.

Another issue is that a lot of languages are bringing Erlang's best feature (actor model concurrency) via libraries or into their core, so it makes me less interested in pursuing Erlang.

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

#73

Post by Luc »

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 don't think so.

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

#74

Post by TeMPOraL »

DougWebb wrote: post #33

I haven't looked at Erlang before, so I thought I give it a quick look. Google led me to the Erlang home page[1], which has "What is Erlang" (sounds good) and "What is OTP" (which doesn't bother to define what O, T, and P stand for.) Following the Erlang Quickstart [2] link, I get a page that doesn't really tell me anything about the language. It demonstrates a program that implements a factorial function, then tells…

> (which doesn't bother to define what O, T, and P stand for.)

It obviously stands for Outlaw Techno Psychobitch ;).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=rRb... (Erlang The Movie II)

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

#75

Post by IsTom »

timje1 wrote: post #52
jaimebuelta wrote: post #36

Erlang is a very specialised language. It does one thing well (scalability) at the expense of not really being a general purpose language. The syntax is just weird, not only in a paradigm-way (pattern matching is not huge in most languages, but, hey, that's the way of doing stuff in functional programming), but on strange places ("read" lines ending on dot, semicolon takes time, it does not share any common syntax de…

This. It's amazing and powerful if you need 1m+ client connections per server. Outside of the epic scale engineering problems of facebook, twitter, google, amazon, whatsapp... It's very difficult to get anything done with Erlang. If you have fewer than a million people using your application at a time, you're probably better off writing it in a more normal language.

I disagree. Erlang is great for even small applications, as long as they're never turned off.

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

#76

Post by gcb0 »

gordonguthrie wrote: post #3

Pierre Fenoll has provided a link to an extensive list of links (and summarised them) about why it has not taken off: https://github.com/fenollp/kju/blob/master/criticisms.md

If you skip the syntax part and the "query" pet peevy, it is as if he was reading my mind! Spot on

The string part specially... will have to check out his binary string code.

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

#77

Post by skittles »

Erlang needs a production quality web server that is a fully compliant OTP application, and mnesia needs to have its dependency on dets abstracted away so that other storage engines can be used (relational database of choice, dynamodb, etc.). This would give a web developer a single platform that is extremely fault tolerant and scalable. This sort of thing may be possible (by using an embedded web server wrapped in your own OTP code and by experimental mnesia extensions), but it wouldn't be easy to get it set up and working.

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

#78

Post by pyotrgalois »

jderick wrote: post #50

I've used it and I like it alright. I like the CSP style communication and automatic serialization especially. However, I probably would seek another alternative in the future. Here are my primary concerns. 1. Erlang performance is not very good (forcing significant FFI usage which is a pain). 2. Debugging code which is a mix of Erlang and C is difficult 3. Weakly typed language seems unsuitable for larger projects.…

Distel solves most of your 3 point. I am working as a full time Erlang developer for the last half year on a company with 6 or 7 Erlang developers. We got some big projects (many thousands concurrent users), and never had an issue with the fact that Erlang is weakly typed.

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

#79

Post by gordonguthrie »

Luc wrote: post #55
DougWebb wrote: post #33

I haven't looked at Erlang before, so I thought I give it a quick look. Google led me to the Erlang home page[1], which has "What is Erlang" (sounds good) and "What is OTP" (which doesn't bother to define what O, T, and P stand for.) Following the Erlang Quickstart [2] link, I get a page that doesn't really tell me anything about the language. It demonstrates a program that implements a factorial function, then tells…

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?

He's doing this in good faith because I, the original poster, asked him too. This is the best answer on the page (for me).

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

#80

Post by vertex-four »

nousernamesleft wrote: post #58
theophrastus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm always baffled by these kinds of statements. I learned ocaml first, so haskell wasn't too big a leap for me. But I did get to watch my wife go through the process of learning haskell, and she didn't have any more problems than learning any other language. My wife is a web designer. She has no interest in programming. She taught herself PHP and javascript because she needed to use them. When she finally got to the…

> This idea that you need to be a compsci phd or something to use haskell is simply not reality.

The fact that there is so much maths talk surrounding Haskell really doesn't help. And I've watched many, many discussions about Haskell go into deep arguments about category theory. I want to write a program, not write a computer science paper.

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