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Erlang's advantage is being able to build a featureful, secure, scalable and performant enough communication backend in very little time and effort. This is a n
by rapsey 7y ago
Erlang's advantage is being able to build a featureful, secure, scalable and performant enough communication backend in very little time and effort. This is a niche in which it can not be beaten.
- 0xFACEFEED 7y agoTime/effort/security/performance, really? IIRC the reasons to consider Erlang is purely to do with building a fault tolerant highly distributed system.
- rapsey 7y agoYou are missing the forest for the trees.
- vim-guru 7y agoThis. And it's ability to be introspected in realtime. It has a REPL-experience very much like lisp's do
- ailideex 7y agoNot sure what you mean by introspection in real time ... but if you mean runtime introspection this is not that much of a niche feature. If you mean remote debugging, again not that much of a niche feature. JVM and Javascript provides both.
- dnautics 7y agoI would say that at least the elixir ecosystem puts a very high priority on making sane security very easy, especially Phoenix and nerves
- otabdeveloper4 7y ago> ...in very little time and effort. You have a very naive view of large-scale distributed systems. For companies that truly need them, "time" and "effort" are never a consideration. Furthermore, the challenges facing these companies in battling project delays and cost overruns are the 100% organizational and political, not technical.
- rapsey 7y agoWhere did I mention "large-scale distributed systems"? My entire intention was to say Erlang is easy to get off the ground with quickly. Most companies outside of the Silicon valley bubble are resource limited.
- otabdeveloper4 7y agoLet me unpack my way comment: a) Erlang (as opposed to something else) is only useful for large distributed systems. b) If your organization is at the scale where you need a large distributed system, then the problems in your project aren't related to code or to coding speed.
- rapsey 7y agoa) But it is not. Erlang is a very productive language and works great even for small projects. b) Needing a large distributed system is a requirement that one can get to from lots of situations. You are making way too large of a generalization.
- otabdeveloper4 7y agoa) Every programming language is a "very productive language" that "works great". Nobody ever thought to themselves "let's make a programming language that's hard to use and wastes time". (And even if they did, they would have never convinced other people to use it.) b) No. Large distributed systems is not something you stumble onto, it's a result of many years of organic growth.
- toast0 7y agoBeing able to build these systems with significantly less time and effort makes them more approachable for smaller teams and companies, where time and effort can be more important than organizational politics.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoSure if you truly need something you will build it no matter what time or effort is involved, so in this way it is not a consideration. On the other hand if you can build it in half the time or cost you might find that some considering will be done as to which path should be chosen.
- ailideex 7y agoHow is the ability to do this measured and where can I see the measures of this?