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Unlikely. They are providing a small amount of competition for the massive-concurrency sweet spot that Erlang accidentally found itself in, but they do not eve

by evgen 16y ago

Unlikely. They are providing a small amount of competition for the massive-concurrency sweet spot that Erlang accidentally found itself in, but they do not even begin to provide the basics necessary to play in the reliable/fault-tolerant sphere that Erlang well and truly owns. Node and Scala will definitely pick up mindshare as "like Erlang, but easier if you know [Javascript | Java]" but I have a strong suspicion that they are going to end up feeding people _into_ Erlang in the long run.

davidw 16y ago
Like Java feeds people into Smalltalk? My experience is that some pioneering language does things in a certain way, and then mainstream languages borrow enough of that to be an improvement on what's gone before. Maybe a tiny portion go look up what came before, but mostly not really. "reliable/fault-tolerant sphere that Erlang well and truly owns." - that's not the "some" I was referring to, and it's likely that Erlang will continue to be strong there. However, concurrency is what people are most interested in. People mostly don't care if web apps are as reliable as phone switches, but care a lot about easier models of concurrency.
- evgen 16y ago
  More like how Java feeds people into that popular Smalltalk variant known as Ruby. Sometimes mainstream languages can borrow enough features to pass themselves off as "close enough", but it is also frequently the case that attempts to make this move never really catch on. Twisted tried to pull off this same trick for Python and IMHO it never really managed to make the grade until the enhanced generators and yield statements in recent versions of Python allowed people to write code that was not a complicated mass of callback hell. Node.js might thread the needle, but it seems equally likely that the role played by node.js will be subsumed by a better runtime and javascript will be used to write functions and handlers that execute on the Java or Erlang VMs -- to the users/coders the system will appear the same but they will gain the benefits of a stronger set of concurrency primitives in the runtime.

by evgen 16y ago

davidw 16y ago

Like Java feeds people into Smalltalk? My experience is that some pioneering language does things in a certain way, and then mainstream languages borrow enough of that to be an improvement on what's gone before. Maybe a tiny portion go look up what came before, but mostly not really. "reliable/fault-tolerant sphere that Erlang well and truly owns." - that's not the "some" I was referring to, and it's likely that Erlang will continue to be strong there. However, concurrency is what people are most interested in. People mostly don't care if web apps are as reliable as phone switches, but care a lot about easier models of concurrency.

evgen 16y ago
More like how Java feeds people into that popular Smalltalk variant known as Ruby. Sometimes mainstream languages can borrow enough features to pass themselves off as "close enough", but it is also frequently the case that attempts to make this move never really catch on. Twisted tried to pull off this same trick for Python and IMHO it never really managed to make the grade until the enhanced generators and yield statements in recent versions of Python allowed people to write code that was not a complicated mass of callback hell. Node.js might thread the needle, but it seems equally likely that the role played by node.js will be subsumed by a better runtime and javascript will be used to write functions and handlers that execute on the Java or Erlang VMs -- to the users/coders the system will appear the same but they will gain the benefits of a stronger set of concurrency primitives in the runtime.