You can pick it up in a weekend. A lower entry bar means more people will try it out.
> It feels like it was invented in a universe where Haskell, OCaml, Erlang, Smalltalk, Lisp and so many more languages and research in languages never happened.
It was developed in a large enterprise context not in an academic context. I think it shows.
Which makes Go's rapid popularity as a language for solving the same problem even more peculiar. Especially since Go's surrounding tracing, debugging, and online code swapping facilities are so much worse.
I'm sure some component of that is Ericsson's complete lack of interest in evangelism and Erlang Solution's apparent lack of capability to effectively evangelize, but it still seems like Go isn't so much filling a void as it is being better at attracting an ecosystem that delights in reinventing a particular set of wheels.
Java was very much the same way for a very long time.
Session establishment for PSTN can be relatively expensive (much in the way of TLS handshakes), so concurrency and shared-nothing memory model together allowed for real-time streaming to keep on working no matter what else happened. The three main features of a PSTN switch are, after all:
1. Reliable call switching
2. Reliable real-time throughput
3. Reliable billing and accounting data generation
We don't think much of throughput these days, when any home office switch has gigabit ports and 40Gb+ backplane. As far as I know, maximising throughput bandwidth was not a primary consideration with Erlang. Reliable real-time streaming is much more about guaranteed latency - and incidentally, optimising between latency and throughput tends to be all about tradeoffs.
* Inasmuch as you can make a blanket statement like this about a language, Go's speed is very much comparable to Java's.
* Java has a huge number of garbage collectors available. You're just talking about the default, but there are extremely low-latency GCs.
* Java has a bunch of ahead-of-time compilers; thanks to Android this might be the most common deployment of Java.
Even green threads were tried (and sensibly abandoned) in Java before.
I think people may not be aware of all the options available in the Java ecosystem, but other than sized types, which are theoretically coming to Java 10, there isn't much performance-wise that Go does and Java doesn't.
1x time: C
1.5x time: C++ (with smart pointers)
~2x time: Objective-C (almost everything is a heap smart pointer)
3x time: Java, Golang (optimized GC languages)
I'm probably outing myself as the lord regent of all impostor plebs, but Erlang is not IMO an approachable language regardless of its origins. Put differently : it looks completely nuts. I'm sure there's a method to the madness, but comparing it to Golang feels misguided (at least, from the perspective of awful programmers like myself)
Elixir by comparison is significantly more complicated, but the fact that it looks tacitly like Ruby is apparently very attractive.
I suspect I could sit down with you for an hour and remove all the weirdest seeming bits which feel alien. Such that the rest of it would just feel like any other programming language, and you'd be able to immediately start dissecting and understanding other people's code.
Part of the problem with Erlang (again an evangelism problem) is that there's not much in the way of attractive and we'll structured on-boarding documentation. It's mostly really simple. It's just that the Erlang docs seem to go to great lengths to obfuscate that fact. In large part because they don't do anything to intentionally build "background schema" with the reader by drawing comparisons to similar things they're probably already familiar with in other ecosystems.
{ok, u_no_me, {down_with, init, [State, Mod, OtherMod, Pid, SomeImportantRefIforget]}, {permanent, brutal_kill, 10000, 9999, 100000, 5, worker}
There are just so many things that make dealing with OTP nicer in Elixir. This is to say nothing of the meta-patterns that Elixir has driven home: Agents, Tasks, the actual supervisor/worker interfaces themselves. You could go on here.
I haven't even gotten to macros -- Have you ever had to make your own behavior, say for an acceptor/worker pool of some variety (presumably non-tcp, otherwise just ranch that out). Making your own behavior (what armstrong himself called "really advanced") is the easy part here. You've got to create a system where you pass around the TRUE module that holds the correct `handle_call/cast/info` implementation back and forth through the true module and the OTP state parameter.
This whole pattern (which comes with very real runtime costs) just doesn't even exist in Elixir. You just create a macro. A macro that sets all of this up at build time. No complex supervisor hierarchies where you need to constantly inspect each and every message, no custom behaviors, etc. You just have a mostly sane way of sharing software logic to begin with.
You can work up really clever solutions with parse_transforms, even standard "-define", but today Elixir has a totally brilliant solution to this problem and many more classes of problems.
This isn't to say there an't blindspots (beyond "wrap proc_lib/inets/other hated library"). There's minor issues here and there. Process registry naming can get confusing, especially operating between Erlang+Elixir supervision trees. Low-level details aren't nearly as well-publicized in Elixir either. There are even big issues, like the Elixir community leaning more "I'm playing around with Elixir because Phoenix is Webscale" than the grizzled realtime adtech/gambling/finance gurus and so if you want help with OTP platform/VM details, you going to have a harder time.
I first tried Elixir in v0.08. & function capture syntax had just been standardized. I suspect that like me, you tried it then, when it wasn't a fully-featured alternative yet. Things have changed and Jose Valim has a vision for the future of Erlang that I think you'd be foolish not to pay attention to.
Having used both Erlang and Elixir "in anger" there are a whole bunch of things that bug me about Erlang. There are a whole bunch of things that bug me about Elixir too. I'm not sure what any of that has to do with what I said. Elixir is a more complicated and larger language than Erlang.
It has structs (which are weirdly implemented as maps instead of records). It has type-classes/traits by way of "protocols" (which are a whole different layer of metaprogramming that could be replaced with behaviours and data-structure definition convention or dialyzer type-spec'ing). It has the pipe operator (which strangely elides the first argument in a function such that map/2 becomes map/1 when written... why no placeholder sigil). It has Agents (which are something which is confusing to have in the standard library as its a specific implementation of a gen_server which acts as a KV-store which will be really, really prone to data races). It has a fair bit of metaprogramming to be aware of in terms of macros and hooks that trigger at code loading/import time (which forces one to need to be a lot more aware of the inner details of 3rd party libraries being used). It eventually devolves into requiring knowledge of Erlang when attempting to do anything regarding debugging, tracing, or distribution related.
Elixir is a great language, and it has a lot of neat features, and I love teaching it to people and being increasingly critical of Erlang based on advancements in usability and community engagement/feedback that I see happening around Elixir. But I don't really need to be proselytized to about it.
> You can pick it up in a weekend. A lower entry bar means more people will try it out.
... and then you get the JavaScript situation where everyone thinks they're an actual programmer at $TEAM_LEAD level of sophistication when it comes to modeling, design, architecture, testing and implementation... but they're really not. It's not their fault per se, it's just that they do not have the necessary experience to realize the areas that they're lacking in. (This is a well-known cognitive bias: More than 50% of people think that they're an above-average driver. There are a precious few who realize that they're not -- they are the exception.)
Programming is hard[1] and if there was an instant-humbling device, I'd buy it in spades.
[1] Most people focus on the "oh, that's Undefined Behavior" bits of it, but it's not really about that. It's about recognizing the types of mistakes that you make and working to avoid them or creating a system that does, whether that's by testing or proof or whatever. Obviously it still has to be _practical_, but AGAIN... it's about tradeoffs. If you don't care about correctness, I'm pretty sure I can whip up a "solution" to any problem that's fast as hell... and not correct. Summa summarum: I think we need to be thinking a lot more in terms of tradeoffs and not so much in absolutes.
I've seen a lot of people in academia writing C++, mostly horrible code. I've seen electrical engineers writing awful assembly code. Because the incentive is mostly to get one task done today. None of these languages have a lower entry bar.
JavaScript is pretty much bound to a singular use case (web development) where there is a lot of incentive to get quick money, which attracts all kinds of people. I don't see the status quo you're referring would be much different if the browser scripting language was Haskell or brainfuck.
I agree, but there are a lot of jobs where it's actually effectively impossible to distinguish between good vs. bad practitioners of said jobs.
I just have this feeling that it should be possible in programming. (Because it's quantifiable... or at least quantizable into "works" or "doesn't work" along any number of axes.)
> I've seen a lot of people in academia writing C++, mostly horrible code. I've seen electrical engineers writing awful assembly code. Because the incentive is mostly to get one task done today. None of these languages have a lower entry bar.
Same here, only with FORTRAN and C.
(This hints that this may be a meta-problem.)
> JavaScript is pretty much bound to a singular use case (web development) where there is a lot of incentive to get quick money, which attracts all kinds of people. I don't see the status quo you're referring would be much different if the browser scripting language was Haskell or brainfuck.
Well, there is node.js, but really, the problem with JS is... JS. It's just a horrific language semantics-wise (syntax: meh). It was invented and implemented in ~7 days(?) and it really shows. (No blame towards Brendan Eich, he did the best that he could within the deadline and even got a little bit of higher-order programming in there.) It's been improving, but just imagine the burden of improving a language that's already been deployed to 1B+ computers. Not an enviable task.
Hopefully WebAssembly will (in time) address these problems and give us a real way to program the front end in $WHATEVER_LANGUAGE_YOU_WANT
I think Pike and the other designers skew more towards corporate research (Bell Labs). And surely the development of GO as well as other Google research projects are intended to win in the market place.
From https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article > The Go programming language was conceived in late 2007 as an answer to some of the problems we were seeing developing software infrastructure at Google
I know it sounds like a lame reason to dislike a language, but I've always found staring at Lisp to be so much more difficult and distracting than C-style syntax.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_(programming_language)
Also, Julia was syntactic and/or semantic sugar on top of femtolisp. Got converted to it in first pass with LISP's power doing the rest. Here's Stefan Karpinski on that:
"So ultimately the reasons for Femtolisp are:
1. Scheme is excellent for writing parsers since trees (aka S-expressions) are its forte.
2. Femtolisp is a small, simple, highly embeddable and remarkably fast Scheme.
3. We control it (and by "we" I mean Jeff) and can fix any bugs we encounter."
Yep, No 1 are those godawful parentheses and s-expressions making the job easier. ;)
And then you discover paredit and you start wishing every other language would let you treat your source code like that.
It's just never been a go to language for me.
printf("Hello world");
(printf "Hello world")
if (var == 2) {
do_something1 ();
} else {
do_something2 ();
}
(if (= var 2)
(do_something1)
(do_something2)
)
The latter group tend to find lisp not that painful because lisp parens/s-exps are as explicit as you can get, and indentation makes parens almost invisible