3 ms·

I don't think this is really about programming languages. The world of software (and specifically everything network based) is oscillating between fat servers a

I don't think this is really about programming languages. The world of software (and specifically everything network based) is oscillating between fat servers and fat client every few years or so. To me the innovation seems to be orthogonal to this cycle and may actually be accelerated by this continuous change in perspective. Which is good!

streamofdigits 5y ago
if the hardware landscape settles for a while (in terms of the capabilities of devices and networks - which is not a crazy precondition given Moore's law has run its course) then it may be that these server/client pendulum oscillations get damped around an "optimum" of sorts. An optimum defined both in terms of what it enables users to do with software but also how easy it is for developers to deliver it. Since simple is better than complex it feels that any architecture that does not require two distinct ecosystems might have an advantage (all else being equal).
dnautics 5y ago
for liveview, it's not at all about "fat servers"; the overhead of maintaining a socket over erlang is not that much (maybe a few K -- the base erlang process overhead is ~400 words), so you're going to almost certainly be doing better than, say ruby (via hotwire) which isn't really designed from the ground up to hold onto the websocket. By persisting the connection with a stateful system, you're going to be avoiding a whole ton of computation that just gets thrown away with stateless HTTP requests. So it's probably in the end a lighter server than most web backends. This is the irony, Erlang/Elixir, despite being functional language with less and highly restricted access to stateful side effects, is really FANTASTIC at safely holding onto state and persisting it for the user, and making that model digestible for the developer.

3 ms·

I don't think this is really about programming languages. The world of software (and specifically everything network based) is oscillating between fat servers a

by sfvisser 5y ago

streamofdigits 5y ago
if the hardware landscape settles for a while (in terms of the capabilities of devices and networks - which is not a crazy precondition given Moore's law has run its course) then it may be that these server/client pendulum oscillations get damped around an "optimum" of sorts. An optimum defined both in terms of what it enables users to do with software but also how easy it is for developers to deliver it. Since simple is better than complex it feels that any architecture that does not require two distinct ecosystems might have an advantage (all else being equal).
dnautics 5y ago
for liveview, it's not at all about "fat servers"; the overhead of maintaining a socket over erlang is not that much (maybe a few K -- the base erlang process overhead is ~400 words), so you're going to almost certainly be doing better than, say ruby (via hotwire) which isn't really designed from the ground up to hold onto the websocket. By persisting the connection with a stateful system, you're going to be avoiding a whole ton of computation that just gets thrown away with stateless HTTP requests. So it's probably in the end a lighter server than most web backends. This is the irony, Erlang/Elixir, despite being functional language with less and highly restricted access to stateful side effects, is really FANTASTIC at safely holding onto state and persisting it for the user, and making that model digestible for the developer.