

Erlang: A New Way to Program That's 20 Years Old - DarrenStuart
http://gigaom.com/2007/12/19/erlang-a-new-way-to-program-thats-20-years-old/
Geeks everywhere got excited recently when they heard that SimpleDB might be based on Erlang. Why? Is Erlang the next big thing? Probably not -- it's a 20-year-old language that some programmers find weird.
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jgrahamc
Since I partly learnt programming at college and was taught about CSP and
Occam, erlang's lightweight processes and inter-process communication model
are very appealing. And it's interesting to see a number of projects get
written in it, and since even Facebook is using it... :-)

This particular article references Tim Bray's attempts to use erlang for web
log processing. He found erlang to be very slow because of the I/O
implementation, and criticized it for its regular expression handling. This
seems like a silly test since surely you'd use Perl and friends for something
like that.

Personally, I'm interested in building something with erlang just to get my
feet wet with the language. And I'd be interested to hear about the
experiences of others with erlang in real projects.

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DarrenStuart
having never played with it I am tempted, I think a webserver might be a could
project for it.

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jgrahamc
The problem with a web server is that I'm not sure there's much interesting
inter-process communication which I think is where erlang would really shine.
Sure you can spawn a lightweight process for each incoming connection, but
after that?

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DarrenStuart
true, but what about a comet one? that way its doing a little more than
serving up data.

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simpleenigma
A friend of mine is working on a comet server in Erlang at
<http://code.google.com/p/erlycomet/>

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DarrenStuart
that looks pretty smart. Anyone know what the hardware to connections ratio is
for it?

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simpleenigma
For those of us who program in Erlang calling it 'weird' is a compliment :-) I
think it's like complaining about parenthesis to a Lisper ...

Both Lisp and Erlang make you think is a different way that once you get into
that mode of thinking you really do become more efficient.

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a-priori
I totally agree, but really, I don't see what's so horribly strange about
Erlang. Don't get me wrong: it's my favourite language and I'm in the process
of founding a startup with Erlang as the core language. I just don't
understand the aversion... people seem to treat it like an impenetrable terra
incognita.

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anupamkapoor
i think its more to do with functional aspects of the language rather than
it's "user-interface" aka the syntax. erlang as first intro to functional
language might be non-trivial (imho ofcourse). starting with sicp to
understand it's (functional programming's) essence should put anyone on terra-
firma.

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Tichy
I recently tried Erlang and it was fun, but I am not that excited by it
anymore. It could do with some convenience features, like arrays. List module
could be imported per default and stuff like that. I ended up having to write
my own methods for fairly standard things (could have been because of my lack
of experience with Erlang, though). And I only did some simple project euler
problems, nothing big.

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evgen
You may want to examine Erlang again. The recent R12B-0 release included an
array module that allows you to do nice sparse-arrays, etc.

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Tichy
Thanks, will do.

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a-priori
That article's horse crap. Do they not have any better criticism of Erlang
other than "it's weird"?

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DarrenStuart
I didn't really feel they were criticizing it but merely pointing out that its
not a main stream programming language.

