Erlang is at long last getting the break it deserves.

http://scaleordie.com/2008/05/17/erlang-is-at-long-last-getting-the-break-it-deserves/

by foemmel • 18 years ago

20 17 18 years ago

davidw• 18 years ago

Yeah, it's got some visibility. The question is: will they be able to run with it? Erlang does some stuff really well, and other things not so well. Will it remain the right tool for a specific job, or something people also use for a variety of tasks? Despite knowing and liking Erlang, my guess is that the first is likelier to occur:

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/09/22/erlang

yariv3• 18 years ago

Erlang is great for writing high-availability, low latency server-based applications -- including web applications.

What people will use it for is up to their imagination. Wings3d (http://www.wings3d.com/) is a good example of using Erlang outside of its "intended" domain.

Don't forget that when Java came out, it was only "good" for writing applets...

inovica3• 18 years ago

I've not tried it yet, but we have to do a particular distributed crawler app for something and it's been recommended to look at it. For me if a language is amazing at something then it would be prudent to focus on that. I often use more than one language in my projects - the best language for the particular job.

simonw• 18 years ago

I'd be a bit scared of using Erlang for crawling since the actual text processing capabilities of the language are pretty weak. Crawling seems like the kind of thing where you'd want a message queue style system (potentially written in Erlang) that co-ordinates plenty of individual crawling processes written in a language better suited for text handling.

inovica3• 18 years ago

Thanks for the tip. I'll bear that in mind.

jfarmer• 18 years ago

Erlang is best for software that works like telco switches, i.e., you have the need to route thousands of messages in real-time.

Chat, IM, SMS, message queues, etc. are all well-suited for Erlang. Tasks that involves lots of I/O and parsing, not so much.

inovica3• 18 years ago

Thanks

KirinDave3• 18 years ago

So you're suggesting that IM, Chat, SMS and message queues aren't about Parsing and I/O?

Erlang has weaknesses, but certainly those are not it. Basically, Erlang excells at writing servers. Take a look at YAWS (http://yaws.hyber.org/) for a web server written in Erlang that can actually outperform more traditional web servers in very realistic scenarios.

If I had to name a weakness or two of erlang offhand:

1. Integrating foreign code with Erlang is very different from traditional FFI and requires some initial legwork (libraries like Erlectricity http://github.com/KirinDave/erlectricity/tree/master , for example).

2. String manipulation. Erlang doesn't have a real string type. Its string libraries and core string type assume using linked lists for strings, which is spectacularly inefficient. However, there is a movement and a proposal to change the string type to Erlang binaries and provide an alternative string library. Hopefully that will address the problem.

Other than that, it's a reasonably fast and rock-solid implementation of an FP language with a mountain of solid IPC library code integrated at the language level.

simpleenigma• 18 years ago

I have done quite a bit of work in Erlang over the past 4 or so years. I even wrote an anti-spam engine hat was heavy on parsing.

The best thing Erlang has going in the parsing area is the binary pattern matching, which if you convert a string to a binary works wonders and is much faster. IN fact switching a string to a binary, doing your parsing with binary pattern matching and switching it back to a string CAN be faster in Erlang than using Erlang's string functions.

I won't go into comparisons to other languages, mostly because my personal opinion is that Erlang has so many other great features that not being good at string processing is a minor issue.

jorgeortiz85• 18 years ago

Erlang may be getting the "recognition" it deserves, but... the "break" it deserves? Really?

Come on guys, give Erlang a break.

Andys• 18 years ago

Also... "deserves" ?

Erlang deserves nothing. Its just another language - one which I happen to think has filthy syntax, and will probably never use for that reason.

keating• 18 years ago

> Facebook chat is a heavy erlang user

Heavy? They must be going by Facebook's user base, not amount of code (the system is a hybrid of multiple languages) or even actual usage (they just launched it, I doubt everyone has switched over from IM yet, if they ever will).

bprater• 18 years ago

I was like 'scale ordie.com', what a strange sounding site. Ohhh, scale-or-die.com.

Erlang is at long last getting the break it deserves.

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