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I've started toying with it, for a possible job opening. Any Erlang coders in the house?
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Brady Kelly wrote: Any Erlang coders in the house?
Not here, but I look forward to seeing your articles on this.
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Brady Kelly wrote: Any Erlang coders in the house
Not really. I read a book about Erlang and played with it a bit, but never coded anything useful.
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From what I've seen/heard about it, I always got the impression that it's one of those over-hyped things that supposedly "fixes all problems with distributed systems and concurrency etc" but actually maybe makes that easier but at the expense of making everything hard.
So, what's it really like?
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I've only just started dabbling in the shell, but it strikes me as both a bit kludgy and very simple and powerful.
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I makes it impossible to mess up concurrency - seriously. The downside is a very unusual syntax (based on Prolog) and a different way of thinking (all variables are immutable - once defined they can't be changed).
Although you can achieve the same aims in other languages (really it's just immutable state and message passing that makes the concurrency rock solid) you have to be damn disciplined to do so.
Anna
Tech Blog | Visual Lint
"Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
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So in other words, my impression is fairly accurate?
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Not really...although it does make things harder (by requiring a completely different way of thinking *) for those of us used to "classic" languages, it addresses a class of problems (massively parallel distributed ones) which aren't easily addressed using conventional approaches.
If you want to solve a problem using an entire cluster of machines, Erlang is a damn fine choice. If you want to write something that will only ever need to runs on one shared-memory system, it probably isn't.
* Mind you, you could also say the same of any functional language.
Anna
Tech Blog | Visual Lint
"Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
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Played with it at a workshop a few years ago (courtesy of the man himself, Joe Armstrong). Impressive language.
Anna
Tech Blog | Visual Lint
"Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
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Yes, I'm very impressed so far.
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