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Erlang has experienced increased popularity. Yet, it has not experienced the avalanche popularity increase you see with e.g., Ruby or Javascript. I think Erlang

by jlouis 14y ago

Erlang has experienced increased popularity. Yet, it has not experienced the avalanche popularity increase you see with e.g., Ruby or Javascript. I think Erlang is lucky that this has not happened since the community would not be able to keep its current excellent condition if that happened. Erlangs forte is in a very specific kind of system. If your problem is * Stateful * Concurrent * State has to "act on its own" * Distributed over multiple machines Then Erlang is a nice tool for the job. The language is not particularly old. Note you are not allowed to call a language old if the "newer" language is based on C or its semantics :)

minikomi 14y ago
Have you built something cool which fits the bill? I'd love to hear about any successes!
- asabil 14y ago
  There are plenty of successes out there: Riak, Ejabberd, Whatsapp messenger, Klarna, Demonware, Soundrop, Wooga... Just to name a few
  - johndonsp 14y ago
    I wonder if those apps run n-times faster on n-cores. I think probably not, due to inherent limitations in the parallelism available in them, but perhaps I should do a study to verify that. Erlang claiming n-times faster on n-cores is snake oil. First of all, not all problems have n-times parallelism in them!
    - gajomi 14y ago
      > Erlang claiming n-times faster on n-cores is snake oil. First of all, not all problems have n-times parallelism in them! I keep reading this claim in Erlang articles, and I wonder why it continues to be made. Its obviously false for the theoretical reason of the limited amount of parallelism in a problem you just stated. It is empirically false on every benchmark I've seen on a real-world architecture (i.e. actual multicore, with actual memory and IO, as opposed to virtual processes). What's strange is that the OP seems to be completely aware of this, but still leads the article with the claim in bold letters before qualifying it later on. To my mind, Erlang is pretty cool as it is, even before a discussion of multicore performance. But I guess if you "have been waiting 20 years for this to happen, and now it’s payback time" (payback for what?) you are OK with a bit of hyperbole.
- vonkow 14y ago
  I was half of the team that created the instapaper-like functionality on bostonglobe.com using Erlang. It fit the bill perfectly and has run (mostly) untouched since it launched. Features like being able to get a REPL on a production node and quickly add and remove machines from a cluster were quite nice to have.
  - minikomi 14y ago
    Sounds like a cool project!
rat87 14y ago
> The language is not particularly old. Note you are not allowed to call a language old if the "newer" language is based on C or its semantics :) What newer language? In my opinion java /c#/ruby/python share little few semantics with c(other then some basic types).

by jlouis 14y ago

minikomi 14y ago

Have you built something cool which fits the bill? I'd love to hear about any successes!

asabil 14y ago
There are plenty of successes out there: Riak, Ejabberd, Whatsapp messenger, Klarna, Demonware, Soundrop, Wooga... Just to name a few
- johndonsp 14y ago
  I wonder if those apps run n-times faster on n-cores. I think probably not, due to inherent limitations in the parallelism available in them, but perhaps I should do a study to verify that. Erlang claiming n-times faster on n-cores is snake oil. First of all, not all problems have n-times parallelism in them!
  - gajomi 14y ago
    > Erlang claiming n-times faster on n-cores is snake oil. First of all, not all problems have n-times parallelism in them! I keep reading this claim in Erlang articles, and I wonder why it continues to be made. Its obviously false for the theoretical reason of the limited amount of parallelism in a problem you just stated. It is empirically false on every benchmark I've seen on a real-world architecture (i.e. actual multicore, with actual memory and IO, as opposed to virtual processes). What's strange is that the OP seems to be completely aware of this, but still leads the article with the claim in bold letters before qualifying it later on. To my mind, Erlang is pretty cool as it is, even before a discussion of multicore performance. But I guess if you "have been waiting 20 years for this to happen, and now it’s payback time" (payback for what?) you are OK with a bit of hyperbole.
vonkow 14y ago
I was half of the team that created the instapaper-like functionality on bostonglobe.com using Erlang. It fit the bill perfectly and has run (mostly) untouched since it launched. Features like being able to get a REPL on a production node and quickly add and remove machines from a cluster were quite nice to have.
- minikomi 14y ago
  Sounds like a cool project!

rat87 14y ago

> The language is not particularly old. Note you are not allowed to call a language old if the "newer" language is based on C or its semantics :) What newer language? In my opinion java /c#/ruby/python share little few semantics with c(other then some basic types).