

Erlang, the next Java - b-man
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/ralph/blogView?showComments=true&entry=3364027251

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KirinDave
I had the fortune of doing a lot of work with Erlang over the last 3 years,
even helping to ship a product that relied on it for some middleware. Erlang
is great for some tasks, and if you don't know it (and you're of a programming
discipline) you should learn it, if only to get comfortable with Actor
concurrency.

My newest job requires interoperability with a lot of Java code, so I've been
working with Akka, using Scala. While I haven't yet been able to examine if it
really can scale the same way that Erlang does, so far its been off to a
fairly good start so long as you are disciplined.

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jcromartie
Is the ending of this paragraph a typo or a joke?

"One way that Erlang differs from OO languages is its emphasis on failure. Any
message can fail. Processes don't raise an exception, they fail. Systems are
structured as worker processes at the bottom that are likely to fail, with
manager processes above them that restart the failed processes. Because
programmers expect processes to fail, they"

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wzdd
Based on the fact that two other people here apparently didn't finish reading
the paragraph either before commenting: if it was a joke, it was a bad one. :)

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viraptor
Yeah... probably a very bad one. I finished the paragraph, but thought the
typo was so obvious that OP was asking about the contents really, not the
silly silly typo.

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locopati
Also, this is a 3yo talk. At what point do we say, no, no it's not (and I'm a
Java guy who really likes Erlang).

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arethuza
I wonder what is the "next Java" then? JavaScript?

(NB I used Java a lot from 1995 to 2002 and I'm now a big fan of JavaScript -
the appeal of being able to do client side, server side and DB coding in one
language).

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m0th87
Why does everyone insist that there will be a next Java? Maybe the programming
language ecosystem is getting less homogenous.

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discreteevent
I like the article's emphasis that it is the lack of shared state that is more
important than the fact that the language is functional. Also it is the
"mystical view" of objects that contains all the value. Unfortunately its also
the baby that some people fail to see when they want to throw out the object
bathwater.

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davidw
I like Erlang, but it is not going to be the next Java in terms of ever
ranking at the top of something like LangPop.com.

