Erlang: A New Way to Program That's 20 Years Old | Hacker News Reader

Erlang: A New Way to Program That's 20 Years Old

gigaom.com

18 pointsDarrenStuart18 comments

Geeks everywhere got excited recently when they heard that SimpleDB might be based on Erlang. Why? Is Erlang the next big thing? Probably not -- it's a 20-year-old language that some programmers find weird.

Open articleView on HN

Since I partly learnt programming at college and was taught about CSP and Occam, erlang's lightweight processes and inter-process communication model are very appealing. And it's interesting to see a number of projects get written in it, and since even Facebook is using it... :-)

This particular article references Tim Bray's attempts to use erlang for web log processing. He found erlang to be very slow because of the I/O implementation, and criticized it for its regular expression handling. This seems like a silly test since surely you'd use Perl and friends for something like that.

Personally, I'm interested in building something with erlang just to get my feet wet with the language. And I'd be interested to hear about the experiences of others with erlang in real projects.

having never played with it I am tempted, I think a webserver might be a could project for it.

The problem with a web server is that I'm not sure there's much interesting inter-process communication which I think is where erlang would really shine. Sure you can spawn a lightweight process for each incoming connection, but after that?

true, but what about a comet one? that way its doing a little more than serving up data.

A friend of mine is working on a comet server in Erlang at http://code.google.com/p/erlycomet/

that looks pretty smart. Anyone know what the hardware to connections ratio is for it?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=90211

The things you would end up learning about Erlang while writing a web server aren't as much about processes but more about pattern matching.

Most people focus on Erlang as an easy way for multi-core/multiprocessor and distributed computing and it is wonderful at that, but the core of the language is a pattern matching engine that is simply amazing.

Also, anyone who thinks that Erlang is slow with regular expression should convert the regular expressions into a binary and try some pattern matching. That tends to be more of the Erlang Way of doing things ...

I've been using Erlang to create ErlyWeb (http://erlyweb.org) and Vimagi (http://vimagi.com) (which is built with ErlyWeb). Erlang is a lot of fun once you get past the initial hurdle.

I'm now very curious -- what is Facebook using Erlang for?

For those of us who program in Erlang calling it 'weird' is a compliment :-) I think it's like complaining about parenthesis to a Lisper ...

Both Lisp and Erlang make you think is a different way that once you get into that mode of thinking you really do become more efficient.

I totally agree, but really, I don't see what's so horribly strange about Erlang. Don't get me wrong: it's my favourite language and I'm in the process of founding a startup with Erlang as the core language. I just don't understand the aversion... people seem to treat it like an impenetrable terra incognita.

i think its more to do with functional aspects of the language rather than it's "user-interface" aka the syntax. erlang as first intro to functional language might be non-trivial (imho ofcourse). starting with sicp to understand it's (functional programming's) essence should put anyone on terra-firma.

I recently tried Erlang and it was fun, but I am not that excited by it anymore. It could do with some convenience features, like arrays. List module could be imported per default and stuff like that. I ended up having to write my own methods for fairly standard things (could have been because of my lack of experience with Erlang, though). And I only did some simple project euler problems, nothing big.

You may want to examine Erlang again. The recent R12B-0 release included an array module that allows you to do nice sparse-arrays, etc.

Thanks, will do.

That article's horse crap. Do they not have any better criticism of Erlang other than "it's weird"?

I didn't really feel they were criticizing it but merely pointing out that its not a main stream programming language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com