Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I fell in love with Erlang

boragonul.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 263 posts

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#91

Post by jacquesm »

dzonga wrote: post #90
sph wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> want some immutable data structures and functions operating on them. 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.

I used to think that Clojure was going to be the first FP language that was going to go mainstream but it seems to have fizzled. What went wrong?

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#92

Post by mock-possum »

> “How can you sum the numbers from 1 to 10 without using a loop?” ... And there it was: recursion.

Wait, is there something I don’t actually understand about recursion? When a recursive function calls itself, is that not a loop?

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#93

Post by skydhash »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #79
isodev wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I was working with it (I was there, 4000 years ago) there was some talk about Swift for the server, but neither obj-C nor Swift ever really breached containment of the Apple ecosystem and -tooling. Which is a shame because at the time I enjoyed working in XCode. Who knew using a mouse swipe to go back in your code would be so natural? Not any other IDE developer, ever. Last time I worked with it it felt very slu…

That is why I don’t like those ecosystems. They’re all relying on magic (code generation and indexing) for everything instead of just providing a good notation.

If you’re creating that closed of an ecosystem, at least learn from history and create something like smalltalk.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#94

Post by ccortes »

mycall wrote: post #60
sph wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I really want to get into ocaml but the syntax is sooo ugly I feel like you need a great IDE set up to be able to be productive with it.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#95

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #75
marceldegraaf wrote: post #9

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…

Being boring is the hallmark of technology that it is worth to invest a career into.

[deleted]

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#96

Post by skydhash »

jacquesm wrote: post #91
dzonga wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> want some immutable data structures and functions operating on them. 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.

I used to think that Clojure was going to be the first FP language that was going to go mainstream but it seems to have fizzled. What went wrong?

FP language is very hard on novice programmers. You can write thousands of lines of bad javascript/java/python code, but you won’t write ten in FP without the whole thing blowing up.

And then there’s the whole evaluation instead of instructions. With FP, you’re always thinking recursively. With imperative, you can coast on a line by line understanding.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#97

Post by mock-possum »

jrm4 wrote: post #69

For what it's worth, I'm stuck on the very first x = x + 1 thing. Not sure if you want to call it a screwup or bad grammar or whatnot, but it is perhaps the huge mistake that the "equals" sign was used for something that feels like, but emphatically DOES NOT mean, "is equal to." It's "put this into that". It's an action verb. Should have perhaps insisted on x x

That’s funny, because to me, it was always immediately obvious that once that line runs, then it must be true - once that line runs, x is now equal to whatever it was before, + 1. It’s the price opposite of the lie, it’s the literal definition of truth, in the sense that what is true is set by that line.

Programming is telling things to the computer, and in this case, you’re telling it what x is. Whatever you tell a computer is all the computer knows, whatever a computer does can only be what it’s told. If you never told it what x was, then x wouldn’t be anything… that’s the truth.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#98

Post by morgancmu »

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…

[dead]

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#99

Post by asa400 »

zwnow wrote: post #54
marceldegraaf wrote: post #9

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.

Thank you for this post and I'll add a note for people who are seeing this and are maybe discouraged about learning Erlang/OTP/Elixir.

I generally agree with you that learning Erlang stuff can be daunting.

I will say that many things worth doing are not easy! Erlang and the whole OTP way of thinking is tough to learn in part because it is genuinely different enough from everything else that is out there that one's odds of being familiar with its conceptual underpinnings are low.

If you have trouble learning Erlang (and OTP specifically) it's not because you're dumb, it's because Erlang is different.

Learning Erlang is not like learning any other dynamic language you've learned. Learning Erlang is closer to learning a bespoke operating system designed to build reliable low-latency long-running systems. It's a larger conceptual lift than going from one dynamic OOP language to another dynamic OOP language.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#100

Post by lomase »

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…

Lets count the number of comercial sucesful released games that don't use mutability or object orientation....

I can't find any.

Post reply on HN