Erlang gets a lot of stuff right for scalable web based stuff, and even though there are many of its influences that have by now made it into other languages and eco systems it is still amazing to me that such a well thought out system is run with such incredible modesty. You'll never see the people behind Erlang be confrontational or evangelists, they just do what they're good at and it is up to you whether you adopt it or not. And that is an interesting thing: the people that are good at this are writing code, not evangelizing. If I had to reboot my career I'd pick this eco system over anything else, it has incredible staying power, handles backwards compatibility issues with grace and has a community that you can be proud of joining. Modest, competent, and with a complete lack of drama.
There's been little drama, the language is relatively stable, the community has always been there when you need them but aren't too pushy and flashy. It all feels mature and – in the best possible way – boring, and that is awesome.
The big open source projects where pretty much all like that in the past, in the 80's/90's/early 2000's - in that respect they feel like a pleasant anachronism before everything needed to be promoted/self-promotional influencer like, the users did the evangelism but the creators where usually much more chill.
Obviously the vast majority of open source projects are still like that but there is definitely a lot more in your face promotion of things that feels different somehow almost aggressive/corporate style even when there is no paid product.
Not knocking the ones who do it, if it's open source they can sing it from a mountain top for all I care, the license it's under matters more.
It's colourful language, but it's just a stand-in for other properties you might care about. For instance, in head(sort(list)), will the whole list be sorted, or will the smallest element be returned? In atomically(doThis(); doThat()), will doThis be 100% reverted if doThat fails? If you stick to pure functions (and in the second example, STM) then you can unfire the missile!
AFAIK, Erlang just fires the missile "over there", not "over here". The author jumped from:
(X = X + 1) is bad
(mailbox = mailbox + message) is so simple!
The author did not say this at all, they barely even touched on capabilities of erlang/OTP. Their focus was on the functional syntax of Erlang.
> For instance, in head(sort(list)), will the whole list be sorted, or will the smallest element be returned?
Your point isn’t clear. The functions have a clear nested call sequence, take a list, sort it, get the head.
Also how is it any different than Haskells `head (sort list)`?
It is declaring a relationship, between the previous value and the current. One way or another, youre defining transformations.
I mean even in the sum example, you see the statement "N is n-1" which is the exact same thing as x = x+1 with = swapped for "is"
I'm saying this with complete sincerity: WHAT IS IT THAT YOU PEOPLE SEE!? What is the fun? What are you addicted to? Typing and seeing the output? Solving a problem?
I feel like I am missing out on some amazing life altering experience when I see people state that. The same thing I have with the article - what does it mean to love a programming language?
az09mugen•1w ago
ramon156•1h ago
darkwater•6m ago