Increased performance ten-fold by switching to a superior language | Hacker News Reader

Increased performance ten-fold by switching to a superior language

github.com

46 pointsrbranson15 comments

Whenever I see someone that scoffs at Blub[1] because Blarb is 'so much better', I instantly think less of them as a developer.

In my experience, people like this spend all their time screwing around with esoteric languages and abstract debates about semicolons, and don't spend any time building anything of value anyway.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't learn Erlang, or Scala, or Haskell, or any number of oddball languages. Doing so makes you a better and more-rounded programmer. But the haughty attitude of 'Blub is better than Blarb' reeks of naïve fanboyism.

Every language brings something to the table, despite their drawbacks. Ruby is beautiful and a joy to work with. Python is powerful and has amazing libraries. PHP is easy to pick up and has a huge community.

Ignoring languages because they aren't 'purely functional', 'high performance', or 'mathematically correct' is hugely ignorant.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Well done sir, nicely put.

"Use the right tool for the right job" is also highly contextual. For the same job the right tool for you may be Python, for me PHP.

I'm starting to think "the right tool for the right job" is one of those 50s advertising things that was pushed by the tools industry. Like smoking making women look independent.

Erlang isn't superior just because its VM is faster and well-designed for high throughput.

It is superior because it is functional, which means, while it's possible, less state, less undefined behavior, less crashes, less bugs. Because it has efficient process-based execution model - easy scalable with less complication, less synchronization, less overhead.

It is superior because it is less verbose and more readable which is really matters for a language, not its runtime.

There are only two big problems with Erlang - there is no huge mediocre crowds with knowledge of language basics and some cowboy-coding experience gained from monkey-spaghetti-patching of some bunch of web-pages, and it has no hyped projects like adding libevent functionality to really good (no kidding!) in-browser VM. (hint: General purpose VM should be, at very least, SMP-aware).

btw, Trolls of all countries, unite! ^_^

He's dismissed as a troll, but I find his commit quite interesting. It allows you to compare a real world working program written in Javascript (a language I know) to the same thing written in Erlang (a language I don't know, but find interesting). A bit like those textbooks with on one side of the page the original Latin text, and the English translation on the other side.

Except that the new code does not really do the same thing at all. The JS code seems to be a SMTP mailer / client whereas the erlang code is clearly an SMTP server.

The "new" code appears to be https://github.com/tonyg/erlang-smtp/blob/master/src/smtp_se... with the copyright notice changed.

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Send_email

But then again, trolling is more fun than contributing to something.. Right?

Apparently he also rewrote Erlang from scratch to be "more efficient and performant" (private repo): https://github.com/eddiedeck/airlang

perlisgram (isn't that a word ?) : "When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop."

It's unclear to me if the lisp version is actually any faster. Does anyone know if this is just a pure troll or if there's any substance to it?

Erlang, not lisp.

Interestingly enough, this long-time Erlang developer is contemplating switching to Clojure for a variety of reasons. ('Erlang is a ghetto')

http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2011/07/trouble-with-erlang-...

"Funargs: Ruby-like blocks for Erlang" is the discussion thread that resulted in that blog post: http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-July/06010...

lisp? Looked like erlang to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com