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>> How do programmers fix these problems? They don’t. They pray. >Ah! No, Joe, that's what you do. I don't know if Joe is a religious man, but I don't believe

>> How do programmers fix these problems? They don’t. They pray. >Ah! No, Joe, that's what you do. I don't know if Joe is a religious man, but I don't believe beseeching the Almighty was one of the reasons listed for why an Ericsson switch was able to achieve nine 9's of availability. > Most of developers have figured out how to do concurrency and parallelism with mutable state and locks. It appears to me that the industry has moved to a combination of promises, message passing, thread-safe data structures, transactions, etc., instead of code that directly manipulates locks. >...as opposed to Erlang, are statically typed, hence much more suitable to the kind of large scale software you describe. Depends on what you mean for scale. If you mean "suitable for gargantuan code bases and development teams" then it might not be the best. If you mean "suitable for processing large volumes of requests/events with low latency" then Erlang should be fine. Types are nice, and I try to heavily leverage the type analysis tools that are available for Erlang (e.g. dialyzer). Java & C# (the two main static languages) are OK, but presence of null pointer exceptions and absence of sum types, intersection types, tuples, etc. really makes righting terse, type-safe code a chore.

daddykotex 10y ago
I think that's where Scala shines. I don't know if you have tried it, but it solves a bunch of the problem you enumerate with Java & C. Sure, it can be hard to read because you can write the same thing in tens of different ways and some people abuse it, but if you don't and your team does not, you end up with a beautiful code base.
- lliamander 10y ago
  I believe it does. The only issue I take is that I believe null objects are still possible. Kotlin and Ceylon both correctly addressed this (but lack some of the sophisticated type features found in Scala).

daddykotex 10y ago

I think that's where Scala shines. I don't know if you have tried it, but it solves a bunch of the problem you enumerate with Java & C. Sure, it can be hard to read because you can write the same thing in tens of different ways and some people abuse it, but if you don't and your team does not, you end up with a beautiful code base.

lliamander 10y ago
I believe it does. The only issue I take is that I believe null objects are still possible. Kotlin and Ceylon both correctly addressed this (but lack some of the sophisticated type features found in Scala).