4 ms·
I fall under the "tried it & stopped" category. I stumbled upon Erlang in 2011, and did the full "Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!" tutorial and about 1/2
by waffle_ss 13y ago
I fall under the "tried it & stopped" category.
I stumbled upon Erlang in 2011, and did the full "Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!" tutorial and about 1/2 of the Erlang Programming book (and exercises). Where I ended up is that I had no real-world use cases that would benefit from Erlang, so I just kind of atrophied with it. It seems to me like Erlang is really really good at building programs that can be modeled with message passing (like chat), but a lot of problems are difficult to map to that paradigm (or perhaps my mind just has trouble envisioning how to do it yet). The closest I got was starting to use it to write a distributed Web crawler, but I ended up using scrapy (a Python framework) because the string manipulation was annoying with Erlang, and scrapy already had a lot of features that I would have had to re-implement on my own. But as I'm starting to try and manage crawler distribution with Celery and RabbitMQ, I find myself starting to think more and more about how Erlang would probably do this bit in particular better, so I might return to it.
The language that I've since discovered I really want for most tasks is Haskell. I've been programming Ruby full-time for the last few years, and I've grown really jaded with it. I get sick of having to write so many unit tests around everything in what I see as a poor fix for its loosy-goosyness. I'm still pretty early on in learning Haskell, but I find the approach towards correctness first to be exactly what I want, and while so far some of the material is pretty challenging I can see it will be very rewarding as well.