How I fell in love with Erlang
boragonul.com
How I fell in love with Erlang
1–10 of 263 posts
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#2Unrelated to the topic, but I really like the feature `> cd ..` at the bottom of the article. It's simple and accessible even with a smartphone. I wonder if there is an easter egg inside.
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#3Great talk i love it and thanx for sharing.
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#4Great article & I love the command line interface on the home page.
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#5Unrelated to the topic, but I really like the feature `> cd ..` at the bottom of the article. It's simple and accessible even with a smartphone. I wonder if there is an easter egg inside.
I'd also love a `cd -` on the top left
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#6Nice post, looking forward to more!
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#7It'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 incredible modesty. 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. And that is an interesting thing: the people that are good at this are writing code, not evangelizing. If I had to reboot my career I'd pick this eco system over anything else, it has incredible staying power, handles backwards compatibility issues with grace and has a community that you can be proud of joining. Modest, competent, and with a complete lack of drama.
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#8The hyperbole that Haskellers invoke around pure-functional vs impure is that you're never quite sure whether a function call you make will "fire the missiles".
It's colourful language, but it's just a stand-in for other properties you might care about. For instance, in head(sort(list)), will the whole list be sorted, or will the smallest element be returned? In atomically(doThis(); doThat()), will doThis be 100% reverted if doThat fails? If you stick to pure functions (and in the second example, STM) then you can unfire the missile!
AFAIK, Erlang just fires the missile "over there", not "over here". The author jumped from:
(X = X + 1) is bad
(mailbox = mailbox + message) is so simple!
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#9It'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 awesome.
Re: How I fell in love with Erlang
#10My confusion here is it always seemed liked a simple mapping to take = to mean "make x equal to x+1" rather than "x is already equal to x+1".
It is declaring a relationship, between the previous value and the current. One way or another, youre defining transformations.
I mean even in the sum example, you see the statement "N is n-1" which is the exact same thing as x = x+1 with = swapped for "is"