3 ms·

Caveat before reading my comment: this article is from 2007 and the scene 8 years later is pretty different but the spirit still holds, I think. The author also

by Ixiaus 12y ago

Caveat before reading my comment: this article is from 2007 and the scene 8 years later is pretty different but the spirit still holds, I think. The author also specifically placed "pet programming language" in the article's title which makes my reaction to it a bit unsound since, for example, Haskell is not a "pet programming language". WhatsApp built a 19B product on-top of Erlang. I'm building our startup's product on a mix of Haskell and Erlang; so far it's going well. There's pessimism in this article that neglects to acknowledge adaptability. I agree to a degree with the thought that if I chose to build our product on-top of Idris I would be spending more time building tooling and dealing with immature parts of the language than I would actually building the product. This is not the case with Haskell and other innovative but mature languages / platforms. Once at a certain size we may need to train programmers or develop some tooling internally but I see that happening even with Java and C++. If you can boot up the product with the language / platform effectively and quickly, it's good enough to tackle a 100M product and adaptability can take care of the long-tail.

sheetjs 12y ago
It's funny you mention WhatsApp and Erlang, because the article actually addresses that point: > You're more dependent on the decisions made by the language implementers than you think ... some odd case that didn't matter at all for the problem domain the language was created for The language implementers (employee of Ericsson) made design decisions based on telecom constraints, exactly the same constraints faced by WhatsApp and other messaging systems. In the parlance of the article, WA is in Erlang's problem domain, so a strict interpretation of the author's words would have him agreeing with WhatsApp here
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- MetaCosm 12y ago
  Exactly, it is silly to consider Erlang a "pet language", it is an industry hardened language designed for the a near cousin to problem domain of WhatsApp. 20+ years routing billions of calls a day under soft real-time, high reliability requirements... because you simply expect your phone to work, even phone calls from one end of the world to the other.
IndianAstronaut 12y ago
>I'm building our startup's product on a mix of Haskell and Erlang; so far it's going well. Erlang is a very fascinating language. I am currently working on a small scale state and signaling system built in Java. After looking into Erlang, its way of dealing with similar problems is more elegant and much more scalable.
- azth 12y ago
  Out of curiosity, what do you think of Akka running on top of Java or Scala?
kedean 12y ago
I think you did kind of just prove his point though. 2007 was just about the time that Haskell started seeing its big boom in popularity and the unending series of 'how to monad' articles starting popping up, so when this was written Haskell wasn't really a proven language. In other words, WhatsApp kind of DID bet their $100,000,000 on their pet language, and came out ahead as a result. My takeaway from the article wasn't that less popular languages are bad, it's that you should definitely consider everything before using them for a really important project. If your decision is that it will be a good solution, great! As long as you understand the limitations that you will run into. These days I'd say that Rust is where Haskell was in 2007 (ignoring that Haskell came about in the late eighties). Its gone through a really long incubation period, and is about to get released into the wild, and is getting lots of press in the blogosphere. Now is the point where people will have to decide if its worth banking everything on writing a new, real project in Rust, because right now its still not much more than the pet language of some very vocal bloggers.
- MetaCosm 12y ago
  It is very annoying to me to hear Erlang referenced as a "pet language". It has been around as a language for 28 years, and it has been doing mission critical, soft realtime work of routing billions of phone calls a day for over 20. It wasn't some academic language with no industry chops. Using it to dependably route billions of messages a day is not some crazy off the wall "adopting a pet language" -- it was picking a language that had already been proven (and explicitly designed) to work in a very similar problem domain. It was a smart, reasonable, sane choice that they then pushed to awesome extremes.

by Ixiaus 12y ago

sheetjs 12y ago

It's funny you mention WhatsApp and Erlang, because the article actually addresses that point: > You're more dependent on the decisions made by the language implementers than you think ... some odd case that didn't matter at all for the problem domain the language was created for The language implementers (employee of Ericsson) made design decisions based on telecom constraints, exactly the same constraints faced by WhatsApp and other messaging systems. In the parlance of the article, WA is in Erlang's problem domain, so a strict interpretation of the author's words would have him agreeing with WhatsApp here

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
MetaCosm 12y ago
Exactly, it is silly to consider Erlang a "pet language", it is an industry hardened language designed for the a near cousin to problem domain of WhatsApp. 20+ years routing billions of calls a day under soft real-time, high reliability requirements... because you simply expect your phone to work, even phone calls from one end of the world to the other.

IndianAstronaut 12y ago

>I'm building our startup's product on a mix of Haskell and Erlang; so far it's going well. Erlang is a very fascinating language. I am currently working on a small scale state and signaling system built in Java. After looking into Erlang, its way of dealing with similar problems is more elegant and much more scalable.

azth 12y ago
Out of curiosity, what do you think of Akka running on top of Java or Scala?

kedean 12y ago

I think you did kind of just prove his point though. 2007 was just about the time that Haskell started seeing its big boom in popularity and the unending series of 'how to monad' articles starting popping up, so when this was written Haskell wasn't really a proven language. In other words, WhatsApp kind of DID bet their $100,000,000 on their pet language, and came out ahead as a result. My takeaway from the article wasn't that less popular languages are bad, it's that you should definitely consider everything before using them for a really important project. If your decision is that it will be a good solution, great! As long as you understand the limitations that you will run into. These days I'd say that Rust is where Haskell was in 2007 (ignoring that Haskell came about in the late eighties). Its gone through a really long incubation period, and is about to get released into the wild, and is getting lots of press in the blogosphere. Now is the point where people will have to decide if its worth banking everything on writing a new, real project in Rust, because right now its still not much more than the pet language of some very vocal bloggers.

MetaCosm 12y ago
It is very annoying to me to hear Erlang referenced as a "pet language". It has been around as a language for 28 years, and it has been doing mission critical, soft realtime work of routing billions of phone calls a day for over 20. It wasn't some academic language with no industry chops. Using it to dependably route billions of messages a day is not some crazy off the wall "adopting a pet language" -- it was picking a language that had already been proven (and explicitly designed) to work in a very similar problem domain. It was a smart, reasonable, sane choice that they then pushed to awesome extremes.