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From Joe Armstrong's thesis (p. 6): > In February 1998 Erlang was banned for new product development within Ericsson—the main reason for the ban was that Erics
by stevan 4y ago
From Joe Armstrong's thesis (p. 6):
> In February 1998 Erlang was banned for new product development within Ericsson—the main reason for the ban was that Ericsson wanted to be a consumer of sodware technologies rather than a producer.
From Bjarne Däcker's thesis (2000, p. 37):
> In February 1998, Erlang was banned within Ericsson Radio AB (ERA) for new product projects aimed for external customers because:
>
> “The selection of an implementation language implies a more long-term commitment than selection of processors and OS, due to the longer life cycle of implemented products. Use of a proprietary language, implies a continued effort to maintain and further develop the support and the development environment. It further implies that we cannot easily benefit from, and find synergy with, the evolution following the large scale deployment of globally used languages.” [Ri98]
- christophilus 4y ago> sodware This made me giggle.
- numbsafari 4y agoWhen it comes to buy vs build, the grass _is_ always greener.
- another2another 4y agoThen what you buy turns out to be not nearly as good as you thought, meanwhile lots of motivated open source developers are turning your homegrown build into something really game changing. Sod's Law.
- leoc 4y agoWhat I recall from Erlang writings and videos is that, basically, Ericsson's C++ developers didn't want their cheese moved and successfully deployed the obvious (and not obviously unreasonable) arguments about how C++ was the industry standard, as above. I think Armstrong also admitted that the Erlang crew had a bit of a cocky attitude and wasn't great at winning others over.
- AeroNotix 4y ago> the Erlang crew had a bit of a cocky attitude This is also pretty prevalent in the Erlang users of today. I count myself among those, but I am hopefully not as cocky with it as I once was.
- jacquesm 4y agoIf you're cocky and you have the results to back it up then I'm ok with that.
- andrewflnr 4y agoMorally? Yes. Strategically? Not optimal. :/
- adamddev1 4y agoThis reminds me a lot of Ron Garret's story of the difficulties of advocating for the use of Lisp against the industry standard C for space projects. Sounds like a lot of the exact same dynamics. https://www.corecursive.com/lisp-in-space-with-ron-garret/ https://www.corecursive.com/lisp-in-space-with-ron-garret/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34524552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34524552
- arp242 4y agoAlso, from Wikipedia: "In February 1998, Ericsson Radio Systems banned the in-house use of Erlang for new products, citing a preference for non-proprietary languages. The ban caused Armstrong and others to make plans to leave Ericsson. In March 1998 Ericsson announced the AXD301 switch, containing over a million lines of Erlang and reported to achieve a high availability of nine "9"s. In December 1998, the implementation of Erlang was open-sourced and most of the Erlang team resigned to form a new company Bluetail AB. Ericsson eventually relaxed the ban and re-hired Armstrong in 2004." Not wanting to rely on a fairly esoteric in-house language makes some sense. Since then things have changed significantly of course.
- znpy 4y ago> Not wanting to rely on a fairly esoteric in-house language makes some sense. Not necessarily… thst language clearly was a competitive advantage
- ilikehurdles 4y agoReminds of Paul Graham’s essay on Lisp being a secret weapon for Viaweb, Beating The Averages[1]. [1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
- arp242 4y agoThere's pros and cons to these kind of things. "Best tool for the job" reasoned purely from a technical point of view isn't necessarily the "best tool for the job" when everything is factored in. It's hard for me to judge one way or the other; I wasn't at Ericsson in 1998, or indeed, ever at Ericsson. I just figured that the language wasn't open source at the time and that they came back on their decision just a few year later were important bits missing from the previous comment.
- di4na 4y agoThere have been second hand report of the current leadership at Ericsson saying that opensourcing erlang was the worst decision they had taken. As it would have given way a massive competitive advantage.
- giancarlostoro 4y agoI think the decision makes sense, there are things where paying someone else for the effort can save you on cost and on a maintenance nightmare and you can have your engineers focused on things that matter that already exist and building things that maybe no third party vendor gets it quite right, and that's okay to build in-house.
- leoc 4y agoIt wasn't an obviously crazy argument, especially at the time. The problem is that, in the best case, Greenspun's Tenth Law catches you. Putting things in-band doesn't make them go away.
- giancarlostoro 4y agoSidenote: Isn't there also a law / rule that says every concurrent system eventually ends up reinventing Erlang?
- ramchip 4y agoVirding's First Rule of Programming: > Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Erlang. http://rvirding.blogspot.com/2008/01/virdings-first-rule-of-programming.html http://rvirding.blogspot.com/2008/01/virdings-first-rule-of-...
- pupperino 4y agoPeople really did love "synergy" in the 90s.