81–90 of 263 posts
His PhD thesis explains the thinking behind Erlang, especially how it handles failures, message passing, and concurrency. It was last updated in 2003, 22 years ago, time really flies!
There is also Erlang the Movie 2 trying to sell Erlang (called Outlaw Techno Psyhchobitch in the video) with rock and hot chick: https://youtu.be/rRbY3TMUcgQ?t=262 And they were right, rebranding was all Erlang needed 13 years ago
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It makes it very powerful but very disorienting and experience gained with one part of it often does not really prepare you for other parts. Usually each specific tool was created by someone who used it immediately, so it's all reliable in its way. But there is a lot of redundancy and odd gaps.
Elixir's almost extreme attention to naming, organization, and consistent convention is almost as far as you can get from this approach too. It's fun to have them in the same ecosystem and see that there are actually pros and cons to each approach.
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?
And then, one day you discover the chainsaw, and the fact that you should cross cut.
Suddenly cutting wood no longer feels terrible, it's smooth, stuff works the way you expect. Your chainsaw turns out to have features for all kinds of wood and for many different kinds of joinery that you were hand carving before. It turns out that your chainsaw can be used to control an army of chainsaws without having to do anything at all. You just declare it to be so and it works.
Instead of focusing on your tools all day long you find yourself focusing on the thing that you are actually trying to solve. Where you needed 50 people before, now you need 5.
> 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…
Also, various ways of assignment:
Pascal style:
x := x + 1
(set! x (+ x 1))
x 1 + x !Earlier quoted context omitted.
Port ping.erl and pong.erl to C and we'll compare them.
But I am not contrasting the two languages, I'm very aware of their respective strengths and weaknesses. I am just disagreeing with the fact that C is hard to parse.
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…
Clojure has that for you. plus its jvm which means for your desktop use cases it works. hell with graalvm can be ported to native.