
"Developing Erlang at Yahoo" - New Delicious was rewritten in Erlang - nickb
http://blog.socklabs.com/2008/09/erlang_is_delicious_cufp_slide/
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joshu
Ahem. No, it's not. The new system is MySQL for the datastore, a huge piece of
C++ for the "backend" and PHP for the front end.

The script that copies the data from the old system to the new one is what
they wrote in Erlang.

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iamelgringo
@Joshu How involved are you still over at Yahoo?

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joshu
I'm not. I've been gone three months now.

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akeefer
I'm not sure I'd say "New Delicious was rewritten in Erlang" is an accurate
title here. More like "certain subsystems of Delicious were rewritten in
Erlang." As far as I know no one (or at least hardly anyone) is actually
writing web-applications themselves in Erlang, they're picking off the
subsystems that fit the language's sweet spot.

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joshu
So far as I know, no part of the operational system itself is in Erlang.

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KirinDave
Not that this project isn't cool, but it seems like the ICFP must be desperate
for presentations if this is what suffices.

When we were doing Powerset's infrastructure I didn't even think of writing a
whitepaper or anything, I didn't realize that "Just doing it functionally and
in a distributed fashion" was grounds for attention.

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joshu
If anything ought to be written about the D2 project, it would an illustrated
guide to dysfunctional engineering processes.

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eelco
Nice example of a developer team completely ignoring management and corporate
guidelines. Too bad it took them so long ;)

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cstejerean
Why is Erlang a good fit for an application like Delicious?

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sjs382
Check the slides, specifically #31.

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cstejerean
I'm familiar with some of the strengths of Erlang, but the slides look like
they're written from the point of view of someone that likes Erlang and was
looking for a way to justify rewriting Delicious in it, rather than explaining
what about Delicious made Erlang a wise choice for the task.

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jrockway
_someone that likes Erlang_ ... _what made Erlang a wise choice for the task_

You've just answered your own question. You can solve every problem in every
programming language -- as long as you like what you're doing. If you pick a
langauge you like and a project you like, it will probably get done.

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qhoxie
The presentation is definitely worth a look. Evidence of erlang becoming a
solution to real problems is coming up more and more, and the examples (like
this) are significant.

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quasimojo
unless its php, java, or perl, (in order of precedence), it is not a web
production language at yahoo

and beyond fanboying, there is nothing particular about erlang that makes it
appropriate for this problem. and don't say "scaling"...yahoo's answer to
scaling is the same as google's...lots of machines (far more than needed), and
lots of money.

