4 ms·
"Who cares if Erlang starts slowly? It was designed to start once and never stop."
- wmf 19y agoAnother interesting quote from the same message: "repeat after me: client = flash in the browser, server = erlang. Intermediate protocol = flash AMF" Now that's opinionated software.
- davidw 19y agoI guess if you wanted to be snippy, you could say that Erlang isn't good at doing something it wasn't specifically designed for, which isn't a great feature for a language. I actually like Erlang, and have used it professionally, but have a feeling that it's just not going to be a language that's used too much outside of its sweet spot.
- dima 19y agoErlang was designed for building scalable, highly available distributed systems. If it's not good at building other things, e.g. first person shooters, that's not a meaningful disadvantage.
- pius 19y agoyou could say that Erlang isn't good at doing something it wasn't specifically designed for, which isn't a great feature for a language To be fair, slowness of startup time would be a criticism of the stock Erlang runtime, rather than of the language itself. As projects like Squeak, Rubinius, and the official Java VM have shown, this sort of speed issue can improve independently of the language semantics.
- davidw 19y agoIn the real world though, the current Erlang runtime is all we've got, so it's fair to talk about Erlang's startup time being slow. The runtime has a lot of really good features, too - it's solid, pretty fast, and is very well tested.
- downer 19y ago"Dear Erlang I: X I like you. Really, I do. But until you can read lines of text out of a file and do basic pattern-matching against them acceptably fast (which most people would say is faster than Ruby), you're stuck in a niche; you're a thought experiment and a consciousness-raiser and an engineering showpiece, but you're not a general-purpose tool. Sorry." http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/09/22/Erlang http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/09/22/Erlang