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Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

Node.js is great stuff. It's not new (as far as concepts used), but really nice to work with. Javascript tools and runtimes are growing up very fast; it'll probably go on to surpass Erlang for this purpose if the libs are stable enough. Node.js was the killer framework for JS anyway.

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Javascript tools and runtimes are growing up very fast; it'll probably go on to surpass Erlang for this purpose if the libs are stable enough.

I don't know whether to laugh or to cry... Node/JS may replace EventMachine/Ruby or Twisted/Python for quickly whipping up an evented app or service, but it will be quite a while before anyone would consider moving an erlang project to node. Node is little threat to the distributed, fault-tolerant, concurrent niche that Erlang occupies -- within that realm there is nothing you can do in node that can't be done better in erlang and a great deal of bulletproof infrastructure in the frameworks built up around erlang and its vm that node will never come close to.

I agree with you, I should've phrased that differently. What I meant to say is that a lot of people using it will use it for something which would be better served using Erlang and this will definitely get worse when the tools and runtime improve. If you are using Erlang already , you will probably never move, but if you are new to it, you will be tempted to use Node.js instead, even though Erlang might be a better fit. That's what I meant; sorry for not stating that more clearly.

Holy FUD! I'm sure all the Lisp and TCL fanboys thought the same of their supposedly superior runtimes all the way to eventual irrelevance.

Hubris much?

Um.

What he says is basically true. Node is never going to replace Erlang for the same reasons it will never replace C++. Erlang is simply different from Javascript and no amount of runtime improvement can change that.

Not sure what "replace" and "threat to erlang" means, but: for shops that already run the JVM and .NET, I think many'd be inclined to look at akka (or scala actors) and asynch workflow as available today in F# (and promised for C# 5/.NET 5). But the important thing is that erlang is no static target, development is going very strongly: read the release notes for e.g. R14A, B and B-01.Ask questions on the mailing list if you're not sure what something is, they're very friendly. (maybe someday they'll fix apache not to give out direcotry listings like this ;->

http://www.erlang.org/download/

Apples will never replace oranges.

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