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Ten Years of Erlang

ferd.ca

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Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#2

Post by bfrog »

Interestingly enough I started using Erlang around the same time and while I've continued to use it for the project I started then on and off, I've not had a lot of reason to use it on other projects. I don't ever think it'll be as wide spread or as popular for many of the reasons listed. I do think it will continue to be a tool used to create great projects with very few hands. In the right hands and for the right projects it is an incredibly productive tool.

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#3

Post by giancarlostoro »

As someone who loves servers and back-end work, Erlang is amazing to me. I too read that book by Joe Armstrong, but I never really got to use Erlang for much since I don't get paid to use it. Recently I was trying out Elixir and going through the documentation and was pleasantly surprised how much of it is Erlang-like.

I wish the industry was much more Erlang friendly.

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#4

Post by di4na »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #3

As someone who loves servers and back-end work, Erlang is amazing to me. I too read that book by Joe Armstrong, but I never really got to use Erlang for much since I don't get paid to use it. Recently I was trying out Elixir and going through the documentation and was pleasantly surprised how much of it is Erlang-like. I wish the industry was much more Erlang friendly.

Well elixir explicitly try to not move away from the erlang paradigm and to be fully and "naturally" inter-operable with it. It is far more integrated with erlang than Scala is with Java as an example.

It is basically erlang with better tooling and still an easy use of erlang.

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#5

Post by melling »

bfrog wrote: post #2

Interestingly enough I started using Erlang around the same time and while I've continued to use it for the project I started then on and off, I've not had a lot of reason to use it on other projects. I don't ever think it'll be as wide spread or as popular for many of the reasons listed. I do think it will continue to be a tool used to create great projects with very few hands. In the right hands and for the right p…

If you search HN history, it appears Elixir seems to get much more buzz. Saw this from a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20357055

Elixir is just a slightly changed Erlang syntax?

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#6

Post by sergiotapia »

melling wrote: post #5
bfrog wrote: post #2

Interestingly enough I started using Erlang around the same time and while I've continued to use it for the project I started then on and off, I've not had a lot of reason to use it on other projects. I don't ever think it'll be as wide spread or as popular for many of the reasons listed. I do think it will continue to be a tool used to create great projects with very few hands. In the right hands and for the right p…

If you search HN history, it appears Elixir seems to get much more buzz. Saw this from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20357055 Elixir is just a slightly changed Erlang syntax?

Elixir is a language that compiles down to bytecode that runs on the BEAM VM.

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#7

Post by alberth »

Fantastic article; it paints a great picture of the journey taken & accomplished achieved.

My personal take is that the next major milestone for Erlang/Elixir will be a significantly more performance BEAM. Be it JIT or reworked Hipe.

Elixir (& Phoenix) brought a ton of interest from the Ruby community. The only remaining aspect that would keep a Ruby developer using Ruby is the perf vs Erlang. Today, for many raw perf task there isn’t a meaningful difference in speed (note I’m not taking scalability). As soon as the speed difference becomes meaningful, Erlang will get another wave of people.

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#8

Post by brightball »

melling wrote: post #5
bfrog wrote: post #2

Interestingly enough I started using Erlang around the same time and while I've continued to use it for the project I started then on and off, I've not had a lot of reason to use it on other projects. I don't ever think it'll be as wide spread or as popular for many of the reasons listed. I do think it will continue to be a tool used to create great projects with very few hands. In the right hands and for the right p…

If you search HN history, it appears Elixir seems to get much more buzz. Saw this from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20357055 Elixir is just a slightly changed Erlang syntax?

Cleaner syntax, macros and a whole lot of developer productivity focused tooling.

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#9

Post by tombert »

I love Erlang, and am one of the very few people who (in the past) managed to find work doing it full time. The actor paradigm it provides is surprisingly simple and elegant to write an app, even on a single node, and of course making distributed apps is fairly straightforward as a result of it.

I have found that I like Lisp-Flavoured-Erlang (LFE) a bit more, since I still find the prolog-esque syntax a bit frustrating. I've been doing this stuff for like 6 years, and I still occasionally get tripped up on when to do a comma, semicolon, or period occasionally. While I'm not a huge fan of LISP-2 semantics, overall I find the syntax for LFE to be a lot more consistent than raw Erlang.

This isn't to crap all over regular Erlang though; Erlang was the first language I had seen that fully embraced pattern-matching, and I find that kind of pattern to be incredibly elegant.

If someone reading this hasn't tried out Erlang, do yourself a favor, download and install it, and build a simple TCP chat server. I can virtually guarantee you that it will be easier than anything you've built in C/C++, and it's incredibly satisfying to have something you built in a few hours have the ability to scale correctly.

Re: Ten Years of Erlang

#10

Post by sergiotapia »

Here's to another 10 years of Erlang/Elixir. The programming stack for the boring software developer that wants to clock out at 5 sharp. It's fantastic I tell ya. I have been blessed with opportunities to work with Elixir fulltime and it's hands down the best experience I've had. Compared to C#, Rails, Nodejs, it's miles ahead. (Although C# with dotnet is coming up fast and _crazy_ compared to what it was 9 years ago).

This ladder is a great blueprint, great article:

    functional programming
    isolated processes and concurrency
    reliable concurrency (links, monitors, timeouts)
    OTP behaviours and other system abstractions
    How to structure OTP systems
    How to build releases and handle their life cycle
    How to never take the system down, and how to operate it
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