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Comment by ejiblabahaba | Hacker News Reader

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

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!

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

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