

Building Polyglot (Scala/Erlang) Systems With Scalang - nwjsmith
http://blog.boundary.com/2011/09/23/strangeloop-2011-cliffmoon.html

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jdefarge
Their claim is: Erlang is good for building scalable distributed systems.
Scala has actors too, but Erlang is more than actors (a lot more!). It's a
language created to build distributed systems and highly scalable servers.

On the other hand, Scala is good for data crunching and mutable/immutable data
processing. And you'd have a hard time dealing with mutable data on Erlang. As
they are building a highly scalable data analytics system, it makes a lot of
sense to couple the two languages. But I guess Akka is good enough to the
other 98% of the use cases you may ever find. ;)

~~~
jdefarge
update: An older Cliff Moon's talk about polyglot systems (Erlang and Scala)
is available at [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Building-Polyglot-
Systems...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Building-Polyglot-Systems-with-
JInterface)

Disclaimer: in spite of thinking that Akka is a very cool framework, I think
it can quickly become something like Spring, that is, a humongous framework
that tries to solve everybody's problems.

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noelwelsh
Compatible type systems: lol :)

Can anyone expand on the "complementary set of features"? One of the biggest
selling points for Scala is Akka, which is basically trying to implement
Erlang (as I see it). I'm not very experienced with Erlang, so what's missing
from Akka?

~~~
nathanwdavis
Perhaps by complementary he means: \- Scala allows you to break away from the
share-nothing, strictly immutable constraints of Erlang when you really need
to do that for performance. \- Erlang has OTP, Scala has access to the full
ecosystem of Java libraries.

Not sure what else is complementary.

