4 ms·

Erlang's been fine for showing us what's good and what's bad. But most of all, Erlang allows us to take the good parts and move them to a "friendlier" language

Erlang's been fine for showing us what's good and what's bad. But most of all, Erlang allows us to take the good parts and move them to a "friendlier" language when the time comes.

hvs 14y ago
What do you mean by "Erlang allows us to take the good parts and move them to a 'friendlier' language when the time comes"? Is there something I don't know about porting code from Erlang to other languages? (Not being snarky, genuinely curious.)
- commentzorro 14y ago
  Keep the idea of lightweight processes, crash at will, message passing, etc. and move these techniques into other languages so we don't have the awkward syntax.
  - klibertp 14y ago
    Aaaargh :( Why, why syntax does have to matter? I thought it matters too, at first, but after sixth or so language I noticed the feeling of importance of syntax vanishing. Now I find good support in my editor much more important than syntax. (Edit: and "you don't need editor support if you have good syntax" doesn't seem true to me either)
    - juan_juarez 14y ago
      That's the point. A great many programmers learn one or two languages over the course of their lifetimes - look at all of the career Java and C# programmers.
  - petrohi 14y ago
    There is still great chunk of goodness in the Erlang VM, which is not bound to Erlang language and can be further reused. Much like JVM having things like Scala and JRuby.
  - davidw 14y ago
    If it were just the syntax, it'd be ok. The paradox of Erlang is that the sorts of environments it's used in and that initially supported its development are often fairly conservative, so the features and choices it started out with are not easy to get rid of. This means the language is saddled with some ugly warts. It's really good at what it does and is definitely worth a look, but I agree that sooner or later someone is going to come along and steal lots of the good parts and add them to a more modern language.
ericmoritz 14y ago
Libraries like Akka <http://akka.io/&#62 http://akka.io/> or the Celluloid stack <http://celluloid.io/&#62 http://celluloid.io/> are nice and bring the good parts of OTP to more "friendlier" languages but you're still missing some fundamentals the Erlang VM which bring predictable performance such as distributed garbage collection.

Erlang's been fine for showing us what's good and what's bad. But most of all, Erlang allows us to take the good parts and move them to a "friendlier" language when the time comes.

hvs 14y ago

What do you mean by "Erlang allows us to take the good parts and move them to a 'friendlier' language when the time comes"? Is there something I don't know about porting code from Erlang to other languages? (Not being snarky, genuinely curious.)

commentzorro 14y ago
Keep the idea of lightweight processes, crash at will, message passing, etc. and move these techniques into other languages so we don't have the awkward syntax.
- klibertp 14y ago
  Aaaargh :( Why, why syntax does have to matter? I thought it matters too, at first, but after sixth or so language I noticed the feeling of importance of syntax vanishing. Now I find good support in my editor much more important than syntax. (Edit: and "you don't need editor support if you have good syntax" doesn't seem true to me either)
  - juan_juarez 14y ago
    That's the point. A great many programmers learn one or two languages over the course of their lifetimes - look at all of the career Java and C# programmers.
- petrohi 14y ago
  There is still great chunk of goodness in the Erlang VM, which is not bound to Erlang language and can be further reused. Much like JVM having things like Scala and JRuby.
- davidw 14y ago
  If it were just the syntax, it'd be ok. The paradox of Erlang is that the sorts of environments it's used in and that initially supported its development are often fairly conservative, so the features and choices it started out with are not easy to get rid of. This means the language is saddled with some ugly warts. It's really good at what it does and is definitely worth a look, but I agree that sooner or later someone is going to come along and steal lots of the good parts and add them to a more modern language.

ericmoritz 14y ago

Libraries like Akka <http://akka.io/&#62 http://akka.io/> or the Celluloid stack <http://celluloid.io/&#62 http://celluloid.io/> are nice and bring the good parts of OTP to more "friendlier" languages but you're still missing some fundamentals the Erlang VM which bring predictable performance such as distributed garbage collection.