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Would you say that learning Erlang/OTP has given you transferable knowledge about building concurrent and distributed system? Did you transfer any of that knowl

Would you say that learning Erlang/OTP has given you transferable knowledge about building concurrent and distributed system? Did you transfer any of that knowledge to your Rust designs? Do you have an opinion about Scala/Akka?

ilovecaching 8y ago
I don't have experience with Scala/Akka. Erlang is a good language to learn clustering/concurrency, SMP, queuing theory, etc. Absolutely. If you learn about concurrency through Erlang, you'll have the right mindset. But you should also read Simon Marlow's book about concurrency in Haskell. You should learn pthreads and futexs so you can understand the building blocks of mailboxs and channels and higher level patterns. I am a big believer that you should continually invest in learning and mastering new languages. Each language gives you a different perspective on how to solve problems. But as far as the right tool to build professional software, there are caveats. Safety, correctness, speed, and maintainability are all important factors in choosing the right tools. Edit: I should also say I've had plenty of interviewees who couldn't explain the difference between concurrency vs parallelism, and whose knowledge of these concepts was limited to spawning a pthread and locking shared data. Needless to say these people tend to do really poorly at explaining how to scale a distributed system. Contrast that with the Erlang developers we interviewed, who think in terms of scale. Their answer is almost always something that could accept 10 requests/s or 10 million. Same thing with our Haskell interviewees. They'll answer our algorithms questions by writing out the types and deriving an answers with a single expression. I had an interviewer who was extremely confused by this. We hired the guy that confused him, not only does he understand concurrency, he also understands lazyness and we love lazy developers :)
- mpolsz 8y ago
  So much this. I don't see myself deploying anything big in Erlang anytime soon but learning it (and building one or two small projects) gave me intuition about message passing concurrency. This knowledge transferred very nicely to Android programming with Kotlin coroutines. My colleague was astounded learning how easy it is to model concurrency with actors and channels and how much of it just works.
- conradfr 8y ago
  > I've had plenty of interviewees who couldn't explain the difference between concurrency vs parallelism Is there a good answer when it seems people don't even agree on what those term mean and apply to in CS.
  - ilovecaching 8y ago
    In computer science, concurrency refers to the ability of different parts or units of a program, algorithm, or problem to be executed out-of-order or in partial order, without affecting the final outcome. Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or the execution of processes are carried out simultaneously.
sumnulu 8y ago
Very happy with Akka. It is fast (thanks to JVM), has lots of build-in building blocks / modules and documentation covers everything, also community is very helpful. https://akka.io/docs/ https://akka.io/docs/
- throwaway487548 8y ago
  JVM can't be really fast, since it does lots of context switching when doing I/O, with locking and busy waiting, JNI string conversions, useless buffer copying, etc, etc.
  - michaelcampbell 8y ago
    https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html Yes, yes it can.

ilovecaching 8y ago

I don't have experience with Scala/Akka. Erlang is a good language to learn clustering/concurrency, SMP, queuing theory, etc. Absolutely. If you learn about concurrency through Erlang, you'll have the right mindset. But you should also read Simon Marlow's book about concurrency in Haskell. You should learn pthreads and futexs so you can understand the building blocks of mailboxs and channels and higher level patterns. I am a big believer that you should continually invest in learning and mastering new languages. Each language gives you a different perspective on how to solve problems. But as far as the right tool to build professional software, there are caveats. Safety, correctness, speed, and maintainability are all important factors in choosing the right tools. Edit: I should also say I've had plenty of interviewees who couldn't explain the difference between concurrency vs parallelism, and whose knowledge of these concepts was limited to spawning a pthread and locking shared data. Needless to say these people tend to do really poorly at explaining how to scale a distributed system. Contrast that with the Erlang developers we interviewed, who think in terms of scale. Their answer is almost always something that could accept 10 requests/s or 10 million. Same thing with our Haskell interviewees. They'll answer our algorithms questions by writing out the types and deriving an answers with a single expression. I had an interviewer who was extremely confused by this. We hired the guy that confused him, not only does he understand concurrency, he also understands lazyness and we love lazy developers :)

mpolsz 8y ago
So much this. I don't see myself deploying anything big in Erlang anytime soon but learning it (and building one or two small projects) gave me intuition about message passing concurrency. This knowledge transferred very nicely to Android programming with Kotlin coroutines. My colleague was astounded learning how easy it is to model concurrency with actors and channels and how much of it just works.
conradfr 8y ago
> I've had plenty of interviewees who couldn't explain the difference between concurrency vs parallelism Is there a good answer when it seems people don't even agree on what those term mean and apply to in CS.
- ilovecaching 8y ago
  In computer science, concurrency refers to the ability of different parts or units of a program, algorithm, or problem to be executed out-of-order or in partial order, without affecting the final outcome. Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or the execution of processes are carried out simultaneously.

sumnulu 8y ago

Very happy with Akka. It is fast (thanks to JVM), has lots of build-in building blocks / modules and documentation covers everything, also community is very helpful. https://akka.io/docs/ https://akka.io/docs/

throwaway487548 8y ago
JVM can't be really fast, since it does lots of context switching when doing I/O, with locking and busy waiting, JNI string conversions, useless buffer copying, etc, etc.
- michaelcampbell 8y ago
  https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html Yes, yes it can.