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Can you cite something you consider comparable to AXD301 in another language? The fact that AXD301 is still going is an accomplishment, is it not? With respec

Can you cite something you consider comparable to AXD301 in another language? The fact that AXD301 is still going is an accomplishment, is it not? With respect to Smalltalk: there's a long history of superior technologies losing the market to inferior technologies. The fact that it got displaced by Java is not really much of a criticism.

dmitriid 9y ago
> Can you cite something you consider comparable to AXD301 in another language? Why though? A one-time wonder that gets displayed as the project for 20 years hardly constitutes a proof. > losing the market to inferior technologies. The fact that it got displaced by Java is not really much of a criticism. I keep hearing about these inferior technologies. However, the only ones talking about "inferior technologies" are these marginalised languages that are so full of themselves: Smalltalk, Erlang, Haskell... It comes down to a very simple thing: these languages are supposed to be superior to basically anything else. And yet... There's hardly anything made/built in these projects that can show the world that these claims are true. Except maybe some closed-source business cases. Having been on the inside of one of such a case, I now take these stories with a grain of salt the size of Jupiter.
- EdwardCoffin 9y ago
  > Why though? OK, so you can't. > marginalised languages that are so full of themselves Ok, now your axe-grinding is clear to me.
  - dmitriid 9y ago
    > OK, so you can't. Even if I can't, the success of AXD301 has never been replicated, has it? So it's rather a one-off wonder than something indicative of the platform's strength. For the past 20 years Erlang has been advertising itself as the language to create distributed and scalable services, microservices etc. In 2018 if you really want to build something like that, you are much better off grabbing off-the shelf Java components because there are literally zero tools available in Erlang, and you will have to implement every single thing from scratch yourself. While Erlang was busy boasting how great it is for distributed/parallel computing, and how other languages suck, other languages and platforms (primarily Java/JVM) caught up with it, and then surpassed. While Erlang stood in one place never moving forward.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      There are plenty of distributed computing systems using Erlang, you are not going to be hearing much about them because it is not sexy stuff or open source. Message switches (Twitter for instance), queuing systems (RabbitMQ) and so on all use Erlang under the hood. Erlang and Java compare as apples to oranges. The reason why Erlang to your perception has not moved forward is primarily because it was very good to begin with and because changes are typically incremental rather than revolutionary.
      - dmitriid 9y ago
        I ran a Russian Erlang community site for years, I know pretty much everything there is to know about what's happening in Erlang space. I also worked with Erlang professionally. Despite Erlang's and Erlang community's claims to how good the language is, it is not that good. While Erlang (and it's community) where telling everyone how far ahead in the future it is, other languages and platforms (especially JVM) have caught up to it, and moved way past it. It's nearly impossible to implement anything on par with Hadoop, Kafka, Kubernetes, <countless other distributed frameworks/tools/libraries etc.> in Erlang because for every little thing you can think of you need to build it from scratch. Even Erlang's claim "build massively scalable distributed apps" is a sham: out of the box it cannot handle more that ~80-10-ish nodes[1]. In today's world Java (and Go, increasingly) trumps Erlang in nearly every aspect and claim Erlang might have. There are so few and far in between systems that use Erlang under the hood that it leads me to believe they are mostly flukes and isolated tales of success than proofs/representations of the language's strength. [1] For reference, see RELEASE project. Also, http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~amirg/publications/DE-Bench.pdf http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~amirg/publications/DE-Bench.pdf, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.07234.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.07234.pdf etc. Our website runs on 75 nodes, with geolocated microservices, distributed database access, log aggregation, metrics, parallel deploys, etc. etc. etc. It's a huge overkill, and we're gonna scale it down :) But it was just so easy to do it. All in Python, Java, and PHP (!). In all of Erlang's ecosystem you couldn't find a collection of tools that let you do 10% of that. And you would have to start with writing your own distribution layer on top of Erlang to handle those 75 nodes in three geographical regions.

dmitriid 9y ago

> Can you cite something you consider comparable to AXD301 in another language? Why though? A one-time wonder that gets displayed as the project for 20 years hardly constitutes a proof. > losing the market to inferior technologies. The fact that it got displaced by Java is not really much of a criticism. I keep hearing about these inferior technologies. However, the only ones talking about "inferior technologies" are these marginalised languages that are so full of themselves: Smalltalk, Erlang, Haskell... It comes down to a very simple thing: these languages are supposed to be superior to basically anything else. And yet... There's hardly anything made/built in these projects that can show the world that these claims are true. Except maybe some closed-source business cases. Having been on the inside of one of such a case, I now take these stories with a grain of salt the size of Jupiter.

EdwardCoffin 9y ago
> Why though? OK, so you can't. > marginalised languages that are so full of themselves Ok, now your axe-grinding is clear to me.
- dmitriid 9y ago
  > OK, so you can't. Even if I can't, the success of AXD301 has never been replicated, has it? So it's rather a one-off wonder than something indicative of the platform's strength. For the past 20 years Erlang has been advertising itself as the language to create distributed and scalable services, microservices etc. In 2018 if you really want to build something like that, you are much better off grabbing off-the shelf Java components because there are literally zero tools available in Erlang, and you will have to implement every single thing from scratch yourself. While Erlang was busy boasting how great it is for distributed/parallel computing, and how other languages suck, other languages and platforms (primarily Java/JVM) caught up with it, and then surpassed. While Erlang stood in one place never moving forward.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    There are plenty of distributed computing systems using Erlang, you are not going to be hearing much about them because it is not sexy stuff or open source. Message switches (Twitter for instance), queuing systems (RabbitMQ) and so on all use Erlang under the hood. Erlang and Java compare as apples to oranges. The reason why Erlang to your perception has not moved forward is primarily because it was very good to begin with and because changes are typically incremental rather than revolutionary.
    - dmitriid 9y ago
      I ran a Russian Erlang community site for years, I know pretty much everything there is to know about what's happening in Erlang space. I also worked with Erlang professionally. Despite Erlang's and Erlang community's claims to how good the language is, it is not that good. While Erlang (and it's community) where telling everyone how far ahead in the future it is, other languages and platforms (especially JVM) have caught up to it, and moved way past it. It's nearly impossible to implement anything on par with Hadoop, Kafka, Kubernetes, <countless other distributed frameworks/tools/libraries etc.> in Erlang because for every little thing you can think of you need to build it from scratch. Even Erlang's claim "build massively scalable distributed apps" is a sham: out of the box it cannot handle more that ~80-10-ish nodes[1]. In today's world Java (and Go, increasingly) trumps Erlang in nearly every aspect and claim Erlang might have. There are so few and far in between systems that use Erlang under the hood that it leads me to believe they are mostly flukes and isolated tales of success than proofs/representations of the language's strength. [1] For reference, see RELEASE project. Also, http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~amirg/publications/DE-Bench.pdf http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~amirg/publications/DE-Bench.pdf, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.07234.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.07234.pdf etc. Our website runs on 75 nodes, with geolocated microservices, distributed database access, log aggregation, metrics, parallel deploys, etc. etc. etc. It's a huge overkill, and we're gonna scale it down :) But it was just so easy to do it. All in Python, Java, and PHP (!). In all of Erlang's ecosystem you couldn't find a collection of tools that let you do 10% of that. And you would have to start with writing your own distribution layer on top of Erlang to handle those 75 nodes in three geographical regions.