Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

I get that, but as I say we already knew how to scale those linearly in most programming languages. Erlang brought nothing new there.

It does have advances in things like reloading and supervision.

View on HN

Erlang was invented 30 years ago to solve problems that were not easily solvable by the back then prevalent programming languages. The claim that Erlang hasn’t brought anything new to the table couldn’t be further from the truth. Designing concurrent, fault-tolerant programs was not a problem solved in a satisfying way by the programming languages and technologies that were mainstream back then, which is exactly why Ericsson pursued the path of inventing their own programming language. I suggest everyone to read Joe Armstrong’s paper “Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors”. It’s easy to read and mind expanding even if you do not intend to use Erlang. It can also save one from public embarrassment when one claims ridiculous things as parent and many other remarks in the other comments.

I acknowledged the areas where Erlang did bring advancements such as fault tolerance.

I read that paper, more than once, and his thesis, when I was doing my own PhD on parallelism, so I know the area and related work fairly well.

I don't think I'm embarrassing myself when I say that it's silly to claim that an arbitrary Erlang program should achieve linear scalability. But we don't need to debate with vague claims to originality - as I say Amdahl has done the maths and shows that it is only possible for a program that is embarrassingly parallel.

Concurrency is not parallelism. You conflate parallelism with concurrency in your comments both here and above. I should also mention that for a big part of its life the Erlang virtual machine has had no support for parallelism. Erlang was not invented to solve parallelism so your hypothesis is downright wrong. Parallelism was just a consequence of the concurrency which was not exploited by the Erlang virtual machine until a much later point. And yes, if you read the paper I have referred to in my previous comment you will happily find out exactly the reasons for why Erlang was invented and what sort of problems it has solved. Also, to clarify, I did not claim that you were wrong about Amdahl’s law; you are however completely wrong in your claim that Erlang has brought nothing new other than supervisors and hot code reloading to the table.

I don't know what to say apart from that I disagree with how your describing my argument back to me.

Funny how often that's the only reasonable response. Nitpick: s/your/you're/. I do my part to stop language drift.

I think OP specifically talked about this assertion, "Your Erlang program should just run N times faster on an N core processor." This assertion is about parallelism, not concurrency.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com