3 ms·

Half of it was true for Ruby — many people were unaware. What they don't have in common is people's immediate reaction upon discovering the language. Common fi

by chc 15y ago

Half of it was true for Ruby — many people were unaware. What they don't have in common is people's immediate reaction upon discovering the language. Common first exposure to Ruby: "Oh, wow, that's cool. It looks pretty easy." Common first exposure to Erlang: "Oh, wow, I didn't know you could code in Klingon." I do agree, though, that Erlang could probably gain a lot more popularity if somebody introduced a framework that really showed what it could do. The most popular web framework right now (at least I think it's the most popular — there aren't any official polls or anything) is MochiWeb, which kindasorta doesn't have any documentation.

petercooper 15y ago
Given the visceral reactions to the syntax, perhaps Erlang could be boosted via a CoffeeScript-esque language that compiles down to it? No idea how practical that is with Erlang's idioms but CS helped some previously JS-shy folks get on board.
- chc 15y ago
  There already is one: Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org http://elixir-lang.org). It's created by Jose Valim, who (as you probably know) is also a member of the Rails core team. It's a very interesting language.
  - petercooper 15y ago
    Ah, cool! I knew he'd gone off to build something new but hadn't realize it was Erlang based. Thanks.
pessimizer 15y ago
MochiWeb is a web server, not a web framework. People use nitrogen(1) and webmachine(2) over it. Nitrogen is a pretty fully featured framework, and webmachine is a really light layer that bakes in http/REST semantics. I pretty much exclusively use webmachine with ErlyDTL (an implementation of the Django templating system) on top. There's also erlangweb, and a few others. Both nitrogen and webmachine are pretty well documented. I think it's still all of the periods and arrows that are scaring people off. (1) http://nitrogenproject.com/ http://nitrogenproject.com/ (2) http://wiki.basho.com/Webmachine.html http://wiki.basho.com/Webmachine.html

by chc 15y ago

petercooper 15y ago

Given the visceral reactions to the syntax, perhaps Erlang could be boosted via a CoffeeScript-esque language that compiles down to it? No idea how practical that is with Erlang's idioms but CS helped some previously JS-shy folks get on board.

chc 15y ago
There already is one: Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org http://elixir-lang.org). It's created by Jose Valim, who (as you probably know) is also a member of the Rails core team. It's a very interesting language.
- petercooper 15y ago
  Ah, cool! I knew he'd gone off to build something new but hadn't realize it was Erlang based. Thanks.

pessimizer 15y ago

MochiWeb is a web server, not a web framework. People use nitrogen(1) and webmachine(2) over it. Nitrogen is a pretty fully featured framework, and webmachine is a really light layer that bakes in http/REST semantics. I pretty much exclusively use webmachine with ErlyDTL (an implementation of the Django templating system) on top. There's also erlangweb, and a few others. Both nitrogen and webmachine are pretty well documented. I think it's still all of the periods and arrows that are scaring people off. (1) http://nitrogenproject.com/ http://nitrogenproject.com/ (2) http://wiki.basho.com/Webmachine.html http://wiki.basho.com/Webmachine.html