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It's funny how HN goes through these Erlang cycles. It's a long standing tradition, starting off with 'Erlang Day': https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-
by jacquesm 1y ago
It's funny how HN goes through these Erlang cycles. It's a long standing tradition, starting off with 'Erlang Day': https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11
Erlang gets a lot of stuff right for scalable web based stuff, and even though there are many of its influences that have by now made it into other languages and eco systems it is still amazing to me that such a well thought out system is run with such incredible modesty. You'll never see the people behind Erlang be confrontational or evangelists, they just do what they're good at and it is up to you whether you adopt it or not. And that is an interesting thing: the people that are good at this are writing code, not evangelizing. If I had to reboot my career I'd pick this eco system over anything else, it has incredible staying power, handles backwards compatibility issues with grace and has a community that you can be proud of joining. Modest, competent, and with a complete lack of drama.
- marceldegraaf 1y agoIt's funny that you mention this, and it made me take some time to appreciate I've been working with Elixir full-time for almost 10 years now, and the entire experience has been so... stable. There's been little drama, the language is relatively stable, the community has always been there when you need them but aren't too pushy and flashy. It all feels mature and – in the best possible way – boring, and that is awesome.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- noosphr 1y agoI've moved from Linux to OpenBSD for this reason. It's all so boring it's wonderful.
- christophilus 1y agoI like OpenBSD, but I like Docker and Steam too much to daily-drive it.
- fridder 1y agoFreeBSD can do OCI containers now!
- zwnow 1y agoFor me it took a tremendous amount of work to somewhat understand the OTP stuff though. Its one of those languages where I can never be confident about my implementations, and thankfully it has features to check whether you have stale processes or whatever. A language I am humbled by whenever I use it.
- giraffe_lady 1y agoI love saying this but OTP is a really roughneck standard library. They just added shit to it as they needed it without apparently putting too much consideration into the organization, naming, or conventions. It makes it very powerful but very disorienting and experience gained with one part of it often does not really prepare you for other parts. Usually each specific tool was created by someone who used it immediately, so it's all reliable in its way. But there is a lot of redundancy and odd gaps. Elixir's almost extreme attention to naming, organization, and consistent convention is almost as far as you can get from this approach too. It's fun to have them in the same ecosystem and see that there are actually pros and cons to each approach.
- asa400 1y agoThank you for this post and I'll add a note for people who are seeing this and are maybe discouraged about learning Erlang/OTP/Elixir. I generally agree with you that learning Erlang stuff can be daunting. I will say that many things worth doing are not easy! Erlang and the whole OTP way of thinking is tough to learn in part because it is genuinely different enough from everything else that is out there that one's odds of being familiar with its conceptual underpinnings are low. If you have trouble learning Erlang (and OTP specifically) it's not because you're dumb, it's because Erlang is different. Learning Erlang is not like learning any other dynamic language you've learned. Learning Erlang is closer to learning a bespoke operating system designed to build reliable low-latency long-running systems. It's a larger conceptual lift than going from one dynamic OOP language to another dynamic OOP language.
- simoncion 1y agoIt also took me quite a bit of time to understand OTP. In fact, I had to have a project that actually required what OTP offered to really get it. Two things that definitely helped me understand were reading the somewhat-dated-but-still-useful material on the topic in Learn You Some Erlang, as well as reading through the "OTP Design Principles" section of the Erlang System Documentation.
- jacquesm 1y agoBeing boring is the hallmark of technology that it is worth to invest a career into.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- noir_lord 1y ago> You'll never see the people behind Erlang be confrontational or evangelists, they just do what they're good at and it is up to you whether you adopt it or not. The big open source projects where pretty much all like that in the past, in the 80's/90's/early 2000's - in that respect they feel like a pleasant anachronism before everything needed to be promoted/self-promotional influencer like, the users did the evangelism but the creators where usually much more chill. Obviously the vast majority of open source projects are still like that but there is definitely a lot more in your face promotion of things that feels different somehow almost aggressive/corporate style even when there is no paid product. Not knocking the ones who do it, if it's open source they can sing it from a mountain top for all I care, the license it's under matters more.
- actionfromafar 1y agoI think it's because we are wired that attention is it's own currency nowadays. And it's also true. Even if there's no paid product, you get strength in numbers. If you depend on an open source library, it's usually better for you if others depend on it too.
- noir_lord 1y agoCertainly an element of that but there are also cases where the superior product "lost" to the inferior product because the inferior one was better marketed. So doing some level of promotion becomes necessary if you want users even when you have the better product - the superior product speaks for itself doesn't often apply any more.
- marcosdumay 1y ago> doesn't often apply any more It actually never did, for almost any product. And programming languages are in the lower end of quality actually impacting decisions. People are incredibly resistant to changes there, and just can't evaluate competing options at the same time.
- isodev 1y ago
- SeanDav 1y agoI am just wondering when the next "We-Love-Haskell" cycle is going to start!
- jimbokun 1y agoFeels like Rust has stolen a lot of Haskell thunder, in the sense you can write similar code and satisfy that functional programming itch in a much more popular language, while falling back on imperative programming if you really need it.
- leoc 1y agoI haven't been following closely, but my impression is that the dependently-typed languages/theorem-provers have stolen some of Haskell's "most purely functional, most strongly typed" hype-thunder even though they're even further from being a mainstream implementation language for most projects.
- sph 1y agoI don't think it's cycles, more like newcomers rediscovering the future. I've learned Elixir in 2016 after a lull in my interest in programming languages, and 9 years later it's still my favourite environment by a country mile. It's not the language per se, but the BEAM, the actor model, the immutability — just makes sense, and doing things the C/Rust/Javascript/Python way is like building bridges out of cardboard. For example, I've stepped into the world of game dev and Godot, which is fantastic and uses a regular object-oriented model. After trying to build a non-trivial desktop app with it, my thoughts are consumed by the fact that mutable state and object orientation is the silliest idea, and I'm speaking as someone that really got into Smalltalk and message-passing objects. I don't even need actors and OTP, I just want some immutable data structures and functions operating on them. Erlang/Elixir are fantastic to build servers, but there is a sore lack of something closer to the metal within 80% the speed of a native language. I would build an entire operating system out of it. Why has no one put microkernels and Erlang into a blender? I know there's QNX, but it's still UNIX, not Erlang.
- mycall 1y agoWhat about OCAML, does that fill your needs?
- sph 1y agoIt’s perennially in my list of languages to check out. It felt harder when I looked into it 15 years ago. Now that functional programming is second-nature, it should be much easier. Thanks for the reminder.
- ccortes 1y agoI really want to get into ocaml but the syntax is sooo ugly I feel like you need a great IDE set up to be able to be productive with it.
- codr7 1y agoMight want to check out ReasonML.
- 1y ago
- rat9988 1y agoNice write up. Thank you for taking time to evangelize it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mycall 1y agoDoes anyone know if matrix.org has any Erlang implementations? It seems like the perfect fit to me.
- Arathorn 1y agohttps://www.uhoreg.ca/programming/matrix/polyjuice https://www.uhoreg.ca/programming/matrix/polyjuice is closest
- cpursley 1y ago1/3 of hn posts (maybe more) are "look at this thing we built!" or a combo of that with "plus all this VC money!" where op has basically re-invented something that has existed in Erlang since forever. I don't mind all these cool new things (it's why I visit). But personally, I prefer to cut to the chase and just use Erlang (well, in my case - Elixir).
- morgancmu 1y ago[dead]
- zelphirkalt 1y agoUnfortunately, I have to disagree on the absolute notion, that you will never see someone being not nice in the Erlang world. OK, you technically said "behind Erlang", not "in Erlang ecosystem". But in the Erlang ecosystem and related languages I've had at least 2 encounters, that were not nice. One outright called lack of good documentation for some projects in the Erlang ecosystem bullshit in a public chatroom, and it killed all my motivation to continue exploring that part of the ecosystem, the other one probably without knowing gave low effort dismissive responses to questions about how to best do something, without even knowing the context in which my code appeared, mixing in their personal taste and treating me like a little child. So there are definitely unpleasant people around, just like in many ecosystems. Maybe less so, but I don't know about that. The question is only whether one lets that keep one from doing whatever one came to do.
- jacquesm 1y agoI meant it the way I wrote it, so that makes this a strawman. Every group of > 10 people will have at least one jerk in it.
- bodhi_mind 1y agoThere’s no denying that Erlang is bad ass.
- __turbobrew__ 1y ago> You'll never see the people behind Erlang be confrontational or evangelists Can I interest you in my Rust project hosted in Jujutsu VCS?