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I think the blog post is guilty of the same thing we're all sometimes guilty of when discussing something we like, but few other people seem to appreciate. It's
by quatrefoil 3y ago
I think the blog post is guilty of the same thing we're all sometimes guilty of when discussing something we like, but few other people seem to appreciate. It's this "no, it's great, you just don't understand it" mentality. We get it, they don't, and if we explain the genius of it one more time, the world is going to see the light.
Erlang has been around for a looong time (it's about as old as C++). It never rose to any real prominence, nor has it dominated any well-defined niche. Sometimes, outcomes like that are just a matter of bad timing. But sometimes, people just try your thing, don't like it, and the best response isn't "actually, you just don't get it" - it's to learn and iterate.
- Bjartr 3y agoI thought it dominated, or was at least popular within, the niche it was developed for, telecom hardware. It is the "Ericsson Language" after all Is that not the case?
- quatrefoil 3y agoNot really - at least in my days in that industry, the bulk of telco equipment was running C/C++ or Java code. This included Ericsson gear. Ericsson and one or two other telco companies were definitely using it in production, but it wasn't dominant.
- AceJohnny2 3y agoNo. In fact, Erlang was open-sourced because Ericsson gave up on it. 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. I know this seems like a black mark on Erlang. I think it just demonstrates the difficulty of carving a new niche. Training developers in a new language and paradigm is hard.
- deathtrader666 3y agoOr someone could read it as the Ericsson management not really understanding the capabilities of their own internal tools, and must've read something up on Java or .NET in an HBR article.
- hosh 3y agoI didn't like Erlang when I first tried it. Then later, I found myself doing things in other languages … and I realized what I was trying was significantly less effort in Erlang and I was poorly reinventing ideas from OTP. That was when I pivoted my career to seek out teams that work with Elixir. Some years later, when I finally got around to learning and using Node.js, I realized just how poor the async/await/promise design Node.js was (error-prone by design). But I highly doubt I would convince anyone to really give Elixir or Erlang a go. In my case, it was certainly a case of "it's great but I just didn't understand it".
- mhink 3y ago> Some years later, when I finally got around to learning and using Node.js, I realized just how poor the async/await/promise design Node.js was (error-prone by design). But I highly doubt I would convince anyone to really give Elixir or Erlang a go. IIRC Elixir got a pretty big boost early on thanks to folks making the jump from Rails to Phoenix, so it could kinda be the case that most of the folks who *would* give it a shot *have already* given it a shot. That being said, I have the impression that you'd have more success with folks using Node.js than you might think. I expect there would be more pushback from folks using, say, Golang and Java... if only because the wider dev community doesn't look down its collective nose at those languages quite so much. (Unless you're talking about generics or null values, respectively!)
- hosh 3y agoI have tried with people using Nodejs. I didn’t really get much anywhere. The wall I run into starts with, “what do you think of Typescript?” I don’t try very hard though. At most, I put out feelers and see where it goes, because it is impractical for my team to switch to Nodejs. Due to the nature of the work, Python is a better choice for the team even if I think Elixir can still work better for me.
- zeroc8 3y agoGolang/Java/C++/Javascript developer here. We do look down our collective nose. I've tried to get into Erlang and I'm a big fan of Joe Armstrong. Erlang incorporates great ideas, but using it for a project seems a bit risky, since it is quite different from other mainstream languages. Go is more conservative, but less risky. It's just a C for today's world. I've had lots of success using it, even though I'm aware of its warts (especially when it comes to concurrency). That said, I'm kind of excited about Gleam. Let's see how that works out.
- jimbokun 3y agoWhatsapp had 35 engineers and 450 million users when they sold to Facebook for $21.8 billion. Whatsapp, of course, was developed in Erlang. There are times when the masses are just wrong. The Whatsapp story probably isn't possible with some other technology stack. Of course, maybe it's just that very few applications need to scale in the way Erlang enables.
- Jagerbizzle 3y agoIronically I think the original Facebook messaging did something similar, but they changed tech due to their inability to hire developers competent in the language.
- yen223 3y agoDiscord was (still is?) built on Elixir, which was a descendant of Erlang. It seems Erlang is comfortable in the niche of "real-time messaging platforms"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gregors 3y agoThey've had some recent-ish blog posts about it https://discord.com/blog/maxjourney-pushing-discords-limits-with-a-million-plus-online-users-in-a-single-server https://discord.com/blog/maxjourney-pushing-discords-limits-...
- 3y ago
- mekoka 3y ago> But sometimes, people just try your thing, don't like it, and the best response isn't "actually, you just don't get it" - it's to learn and iterate. Elixir is Erlang with more sugar coating. The language and many of its associated projects (e.g. Phoenix) are regularly touted as some of the most productive development tools. You still don't see people flock toward them. I used to think that large groups of people can't be wrong. Time and personal experience taught me otherwise. Now I know that sometimes it's possible that they actually just don't get it. But that's also fine.
- hasty_pudding 3y agoBillions of people believe theres an invisible man in the sky, not metaphorically, but literally a dude up there with a beard.
- imoverclocked 3y agoIt’s popular enough; Simply making something massively popular rarely makes it better. I think functional programming in general still has a lot to teach most programmers that are writing code in the most popular languages today. That doesn’t mean I think they should be using different languages primarily. It means I think they should make their own environments better by learning what others have figured out before them. Erlang has seen plenty of success IMO.
- bmitc 3y agoErlang wasn't opened sourced or released to the public until 1998. The problem with not using Erlang and Elixir is that people are continually inventing a worse wheel. If you need a scalable system controlling many things robustly and reliably, anything built to solve that problem will be an approximation of the solution provided by Erlang/Elixir.
- knoebber 3y ago> *90% of all internet traffic goes through Erlang controlled nodes (Cisco) (source: https://erlangforums.com/ https://erlangforums.com/ ) Seems like a pretty good outcome to me?
- ephemeral-life 3y ago> But sometimes, people just try your thing, don't like it People don't just try things. And they judge things they havent tried. They stick with what they know. They all got taught java in school, so thats what they use.