4 ms·

This is going to provoke massive eyerolling over at the Erlang industry.

by lalc 16y ago

JonnieCache 16y ago
Somehow I don't think rolling their eyes at developers discovering a need for what they have to offer will do the Erlang community any good. If they sincerely believe that Erlang offers a superior alternative to Node for what the influx of new Node developers need, then they should be looking to provide resources to help these devs "graduate" to erlang. Not once have I seen a blog post saying "Like Node.js? Then you're going to love Erlang! Let me show you why it's better, with some snippets to compare and contrast."
- eberfreitas 16y ago
  I would love to read such article!
- lalc 16y ago
  Oh, I agree. Every time someone advocates Erlang they mention how it was used to build super-reliable telecoms and they start mentioning three-letter acronyms and immediately everyone's eyes glaze over. It just isn't sexy like node (yet?).
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - drdaeman 16y ago
    There are always Efene and Reia if you want sexy things. (However, I find it somehow disturbing that there are almost no documentation on Reia beyond the examples on its site's start page.) One could compare Node.js to Twisted, Tornado or EventMachine. However, comparing Erlang to Node.js is somehow weird as they have different paradigms — Erlang is highly-concurrent with its "green" processes, while Node is single-process single-thread with "asynchronous" paradigm. (However, there are some aspects, that could be compared. Erlang has "let it crash" motto, while in Node.js one has to be careful with any exceptions. Erlang is distributed and Node.js has no notion of processes.)
- flogic 16y ago
  I like different languages but Erlang is like Lisp in that it has yet to really grab me. The difference being, Lisp has far better odds of grabbing me. As far as I can tell, Erlang's advantages can be cloned elsewhere in more pleasant to work with languages.
  - gloob 16y ago
    Could you list what you consider to be Erlang's advantages? Most of the ones that I can think of off the top of my head fall into the range of "possible to clone, but would take a huge amount of engineering effort" (e.g. OTP), or alternatively "a culture issue" (e.g. "let it crash", and the language's completely obsessive focus on application stability, both of which are pretty much diametrically opposed to the common language philosophies today).
    - flogic 16y ago
      I was thinking primarily of "let it crash" and "message passing". They don't seem particularly tied to the language. I'm not familiar enough with the OTP to comment.
    - route66 16y ago
      I must have missed the current common language "philosophies", at least what concerns their opposition to focus on stability ... what are these? Can I avoid them?
      - gloob 16y ago
        C is not a language optimized for stability. The possibility for segfaults, buffer overflows, etc. and the lack of a sensible mechanism for handling them other than "write the program correctly" demonstrate this. It is, essentially, a language optimized for writing Unix. Shell is not a language optimized for stability. It is optimized for interactive use, above all else - it's not even a very good scripting language, even though it's historically been used that way an awful lot. Python is not a language optimized for stability - it's not even mentioned in the Zen of Python: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/ http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/ The primary focus of Java (at the time of it's creation) was "write once, run anywhere". The primary focus of Java (now) is "languages that compile to JVM bytecode are nifty - plus, we have C-like syntax but are a high-level language". The primary focus of Erlang, before and above anything else, is program stability. OTP exists to increase stability. "Let it crash" exists to increase stability. Parallelism and message passing are in the language not because they're neat, but because (if they are used at all sensibly) they will increase stability.
- pchristensen 16y ago
  The talk about node.js over the last few months caused me to buy an Erlang book this week. In at least one case, you're onto something.
- evgen 16y ago
  Not once have I seen a blog post saying "Like Node.js? Then you're going to love Erlang! Let me show you why it's better, with some snippets to compare and contrast." Given the fact that there already exist bridges that can take javascript snippets and run them in sub-processes within erlang I am really surprised that no one has bothered to do a "enode" system that just provides a node-like api for the callouts to the javascript processes.
  - RyanMcGreal 16y ago
    How close is couchdb? Couch is written in erlang but communicates over HTTP via JSON.
    - querulous 16y ago
      not very close. couchdb can only run javascript functions on json objects, and really only to transform those objects into other objects. last i checked, it has no way of interacting with the erlang node it's hosted on.
yalogin 16y ago
Don't worry Node can handle all the eyerolling with ridiculous speed and low memory consumption.

This is going to provoke massive eyerolling over at the Erlang industry.

by lalc 16y ago

This is going to provoke massive eyerolling over at the Erlang industry.

Somehow I don't think rolling their eyes at developers discovering a need for what they have to offer will do the Erlang community any good. If they sincerely believe that Erlang offers a superior alternative to Node for what the influx of new Node developers need, then they should be looking to provide resources to help these devs "graduate" to erlang. Not once have I seen a blog post saying "Like Node.js? Then you're going to love Erlang! Let me show you why it's better, with some snippets to compare and contrast."

eberfreitas 16y ago
I would love to read such article!
lalc 16y ago
Oh, I agree. Every time someone advocates Erlang they mention how it was used to build super-reliable telecoms and they start mentioning three-letter acronyms and immediately everyone's eyes glaze over. It just isn't sexy like node (yet?).
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- drdaeman 16y ago
  There are always Efene and Reia if you want sexy things. (However, I find it somehow disturbing that there are almost no documentation on Reia beyond the examples on its site's start page.) One could compare Node.js to Twisted, Tornado or EventMachine. However, comparing Erlang to Node.js is somehow weird as they have different paradigms — Erlang is highly-concurrent with its "green" processes, while Node is single-process single-thread with "asynchronous" paradigm. (However, there are some aspects, that could be compared. Erlang has "let it crash" motto, while in Node.js one has to be careful with any exceptions. Erlang is distributed and Node.js has no notion of processes.)
flogic 16y ago
I like different languages but Erlang is like Lisp in that it has yet to really grab me. The difference being, Lisp has far better odds of grabbing me. As far as I can tell, Erlang's advantages can be cloned elsewhere in more pleasant to work with languages.
- gloob 16y ago
  Could you list what you consider to be Erlang's advantages? Most of the ones that I can think of off the top of my head fall into the range of "possible to clone, but would take a huge amount of engineering effort" (e.g. OTP), or alternatively "a culture issue" (e.g. "let it crash", and the language's completely obsessive focus on application stability, both of which are pretty much diametrically opposed to the common language philosophies today).
  - flogic 16y ago
    I was thinking primarily of "let it crash" and "message passing". They don't seem particularly tied to the language. I'm not familiar enough with the OTP to comment.
  - route66 16y ago
    I must have missed the current common language "philosophies", at least what concerns their opposition to focus on stability ... what are these? Can I avoid them?
    - gloob 16y ago
      C is not a language optimized for stability. The possibility for segfaults, buffer overflows, etc. and the lack of a sensible mechanism for handling them other than "write the program correctly" demonstrate this. It is, essentially, a language optimized for writing Unix. Shell is not a language optimized for stability. It is optimized for interactive use, above all else - it's not even a very good scripting language, even though it's historically been used that way an awful lot. Python is not a language optimized for stability - it's not even mentioned in the Zen of Python: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/ http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/ The primary focus of Java (at the time of it's creation) was "write once, run anywhere". The primary focus of Java (now) is "languages that compile to JVM bytecode are nifty - plus, we have C-like syntax but are a high-level language". The primary focus of Erlang, before and above anything else, is program stability. OTP exists to increase stability. "Let it crash" exists to increase stability. Parallelism and message passing are in the language not because they're neat, but because (if they are used at all sensibly) they will increase stability.
pchristensen 16y ago
The talk about node.js over the last few months caused me to buy an Erlang book this week. In at least one case, you're onto something.
evgen 16y ago
Not once have I seen a blog post saying "Like Node.js? Then you're going to love Erlang! Let me show you why it's better, with some snippets to compare and contrast." Given the fact that there already exist bridges that can take javascript snippets and run them in sub-processes within erlang I am really surprised that no one has bothered to do a "enode" system that just provides a node-like api for the callouts to the javascript processes.
- RyanMcGreal 16y ago
  How close is couchdb? Couch is written in erlang but communicates over HTTP via JSON.
  - querulous 16y ago
    not very close. couchdb can only run javascript functions on json objects, and really only to transform those objects into other objects. last i checked, it has no way of interacting with the erlang node it's hosted on.

yalogin 16y ago

Don't worry Node can handle all the eyerolling with ridiculous speed and low memory consumption.