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I had heard of him but because no one uses Erlang where I live it was kind of easy to ignore. I wish I hadn’t though. Watching some of the talks he’s given on

by jaabe 7y ago

I had heard of him but because no one uses Erlang where I live it was kind of easy to ignore. I wish I hadn’t though. Watching some of the talks he’s given on the problems of software in the wake of his death has been a real eye opener. The physics approach to building a language which tries to break the laws of physics as little as possible is truly brilliant. I don’t know how much time and effort we could have saved ourselves from wasting if we’d gone with Erlang’s take on concurrency and messaging, but it’s a lot. Just today I scheduled a meeting where we need to talk about how to handle messages not making it all the way through a few REST-based sevices. I doubt we’ll start using Erlang though, it’s just too risky when you can’t hire anyone, but you do feel a little stupid fighting problems Joe solved before your youngest hires were born.

brightball 7y ago
There's always Elixir where you can get the best of both. There's a lot of developers out there.
- jaabe 7y ago
  Not in my country.
  - brightball 7y ago
    Which country?
nathan_long 7y ago
> I doubt we’ll start using Erlang though, it’s just too risky when you can’t hire anyone Can you train them?
toast0 7y ago
> I don’t know how much time and effort we could have saved ourselves from wasting if we’d gone with Erlang’s take on concurrency and messaging, but it’s a lot. [...] > I doubt we’ll start using Erlang though, it’s just too risky when you can’t hire anyone [...] It's a risk to get started, but if you're saving time and effort, that time can be used to train. I work at an Erlang shop, and none of our early employees knew Erlang before we were hired -- we took an existing Erlang application and adjusted it to suit our needs better; over time we've rewritten the whole thing (while it was running). If you're trying to hire experienced Erlang developers, it's hard because there's not that many. Instead, hire smart developers that are willing to try something different, and are good at interfacing with other systems, and willing to look under the hood from time to time.

by jaabe 7y ago

brightball 7y ago

There's always Elixir where you can get the best of both. There's a lot of developers out there.

jaabe 7y ago
Not in my country.
- brightball 7y ago
  Which country?

nathan_long 7y ago

> I doubt we’ll start using Erlang though, it’s just too risky when you can’t hire anyone Can you train them?

toast0 7y ago

> I don’t know how much time and effort we could have saved ourselves from wasting if we’d gone with Erlang’s take on concurrency and messaging, but it’s a lot. [...] > I doubt we’ll start using Erlang though, it’s just too risky when you can’t hire anyone [...] It's a risk to get started, but if you're saving time and effort, that time can be used to train. I work at an Erlang shop, and none of our early employees knew Erlang before we were hired -- we took an existing Erlang application and adjusted it to suit our needs better; over time we've rewritten the whole thing (while it was running). If you're trying to hire experienced Erlang developers, it's hard because there's not that many. Instead, hire smart developers that are willing to try something different, and are good at interfacing with other systems, and willing to look under the hood from time to time.