

AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance - nickb
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/10/att-invents-pro.html

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cstejerean
Well, that's one way to build a social network. Here's all the people you have
talked to, communicated with online or been in proximity of. The problem with
collecting this data is that once the government knows you have the data they
will ask for it.

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chaostheory
why didn't they just use Erlang? It's already proven and stable and it was
designed to process reams and reams of data... not to mention it was made by a
telco (I think) and it was open sourced in 1999

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davidw
It was made by Ericsson, but its specialty is creating fault-tolerant servers,
not processing tons of data. It's a lot slower than C:

[http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all)

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chaostheory
Yes, it's slower if you run it side by side with anything else on one machine,
but I thought Erlang's main strength (in addition to reliability) was making
it easier to create distributed applications on multiple machines (hence a
better data cruncher)? Am I wrong? If I am, what was Oreilly making a big fuss
about (and why do Hadoop/Java proponents like to mention Erlang)?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_>(programming_language)#Concurrency_and_distribution_oriented_language

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davidw
Well... it's a bit easier, but more than anything, it makes it easier in the
sense of not screwing it up. It's not made for massive _calculation_
applications though, like some of the more Fortran/C/C++ oriented things like
MPI. It's oriented more towards fault tollerance - using multiple computers
simply because they won't all fail / be offline in the same moment.

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chaostheory
I don't understand why erlang can't do massive calculations when its optimized
for distrbuted computing? I would think erlang would have a good messaging sys
in place - it is optimized for dist computing afterall

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davidw
Because it's an order of magnitude slower than things like C or Fortran.

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chaostheory
yes in terms of individual machine benchmarks it is slower but it's built for
concurrency and distributed computing (unlike the other languages you cite) -
which means it can better handle do massive multi-computer
computation/calculation jobs. (Parallel programming is hard, especially on
languages not designed to make it easier from the start) O yeah anything that
does distributed processing (including any libraries from other languages)
needs to be reliable b/c if it isn't theoritically you'll either have to start
your data crunching all over again or you'll have inaccurate results. If
something is fast without reliability - what's the point?

Besides what do you think Erickson uses Erlang for? they use it for massive
(and fast) calculations. C is very very difficult to make ultra-reliable, and
Fortran is just archaic. which brings me to another point (the original one)
if C and Fortran are so great why is AT&T not using it and instead designing
another language? my original question afterall was why att is designing
another language when they can just use erlang; not why other languages are
better than erlang

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choward93
This is why people unlock their Iphones...

