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Comment by namaria | Hacker News Reader

You know, there is a programming language based on a PhD thesis on fault tolerance. This programming language is built around a VM that implements lots of great design on error handling. And there is a functional programming language that compiles to the bytecode that this VM runs. It is a delight to use, gives you all the fault tolerance goodness for free, but the name is often cursed in HN threads for some reason.

edit: I might be giving some random episode too much weight. Seems like Elixir and Erlang are actually quite well liked around here

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Hi, author here. I'm a big fan of Armstrong's work, I've watched several of his talks multiple times and always get something new out of them even if I don't agree entirely. :)

I do mention Erlang near the start of the post, around the 360 word mark:

> Joe Armstrong’s talk The Do’s and Don’ts of Error Handling: Armstrong covers the key requirements for handling and recovering from errors in distributed systems, based on his PhD thesis from 2003 (PDF) [sidenote 3].

> [sidenote 3] By this point in time, Armstrong was about 52 years old, and had 10+ years of experience working on Erlang at Ericsson.

> Out of the above, Armstrong’s thesis is probably the most holistic, but it’s grounding in Erlang means that it also does not take into account one of the most widespread forms of static analysis we have today – type systems

When I was reading your article my first thought was most people would only read the intro but many don’t even do that before commenting.

Given how prevalent just reading the headline -> immediately posting a preconceived take is, most information is probably communicated through the top comments these days.

It's a great article but calling Erlang's philosophy of 'Let it crash' a pithy, catchy statement that brushes over the complexities of the real world was an unwarranted attack. There's much more to it and with Elixir on top it goes a long way in lightening the cognitive load of error handling and building fault tolerant software.

They aren't perfect tools but they are also not merely misguided academic exercised combined with vapid catch phrases, as the analysis seems to imply.

I have removed the mention of "Let it crash" from that section, and added a clarification for my original intent. I did not mean it as criticism of Erlang or Joe Armstrong, although I 100% understand how it could've been interpreted as such.

Thanks for the critical feedback.

Hey, thanks for listening.

You seem to put a lot of import on typing, any thoughts on the Elixir effort to introduce that to the language?

Which language is this? I'm sure some people can clue this together from the hints, but I'm not one of them.

Probably Java/Clojure

I meant Erlang/Elixir

Java is also based on a doctorate research on fault tolerance?

No, God, no. Java isn’t based on academic research.

Erlang/Elixir is also a possibility.

But I don't think either Java or Erlang were based on a PhD project?

(Edit: I just looked it up, and Joe Armstrong's PhD was 2003)

I think erlang

Erlang / BEAM would seem to fit, but I haven't seen much disdain for it from HN posters; quite the opposite, actually.

Yeah, it’s a surprising take because Erlang originally used to be a central object of reverence — some would say fetish — on HN.

There was “Erlang Day” when the entire HN front page was about Erlang because pg had made some offhand request for more technical content:

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11

This was nearly 16 years ago apparently… (In my mind it’s in the “sometime before Covid happened” bucket. Sigh.)

Maybe it’s time for another Erlang Day this March 11?

Coincidence: I was just noodling around youtube and saw that "Still Alive" from Portal was added 17 years ago. I'm pretty sure I've discovered a date bug in youtube.

I think Erlang day was mostly a joke to make the website more 'boring' to wannabe l33t h4x0rs.

> some would say fetish

And there it is

But it’s all fetish-positive — people really do admire the language and the runtime.

Wow 16 years ago. I remember that day.

I think OTP is pretty much universally admired, the language syntax and tooling much less so.

Erlangers generally dismiss criticisms about syntax as unimportant, but looking at the popularity of Elixir (which compiles to the same VM) suggests they're wrong about discounting syntax as important when it comes to adoption. Another new language that targets the BEAM VM is Gleam, which looks fantastic.

From reading Armstrong's stories about the origins of Erlang, it seems to me the Prolog syntax was an accident of history and a pragmatic engineering decision at the time, more than it was the deliberate choice of a careful language designer. That suggests that other options shouldn't be dismissed.

I seem to remember a phase when talking about it was denounced as vitriol, together with praising Rust. Maybe it was just a phase, maybe I took some random criticism too seriously.

Really!? I must have missed that; I genuinely thought you must be talking about Java but couldn't make the description fit!

Don't forget Gleam! It is young, but has a less steep learning curve than Erlang/Elixir. And it is strongly and soundly typed, with errors as values.

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