Java has never been a particularly relevant language to me, despite being the first language I tried to teach myself. I've managed to avoid Java in my work, in my brief college eduction, and in my self-eductation. I've been aware that there's a whole giant word of Java out there in the IT industry but I consider myself privileged to have never been mired in it beyond editing the occasional XML configuration or fixing minor bugs.
I think Russ Beattie's claim that Java needs an overhaul is dead on, but I also liked this observation:
"The reason people are looking at Erlang is not because its beautiful syntax, great documentation, or up-to-date libraries. Trust me. It's because the Erlang VM can run for long periods of time, scaling linearly across cores or processors filling the same niche that Java does right now on the server."If Ruby supported lightweight green threads, pattern matching, and some of the concurrency paradigms that Erlang offers, nobody would even be looking at the language. While Ruby may yet improve on this front, just about everybody I know who works on large-scale web applications has at least taken a hard look at Erlang, and some are diving right in.
4 comments:
Scala supports lightweight concurrency (actors style similar to Erlang), pattern matching, mixins, and has a powerfully expressive type system. Really, I think more people should be looking at it.
Jesus, why am I writing a comment on your blog instead of being outside on the beach? I'm in hawaii for crying out loud.
Some of what Erlang does, at least how it does it efficiently, depends on not having mutable data structures. You can't really bolt that on to a language like Ruby or Python in a way that can be seamlessly integrated with existing code.
Scala is a very risky proposition because nobody actually uses it yet, where Erlang is 20 years old now and it's been in high-reliability production systems forever. Sure, some of the libraries kinda suck, but the VM is rock-solid (if you use Solaris or Linux anyway). You don't have to write *everything* in Erlang either, we use Python for a lot of stuff too.
Also, Theives Tavern does win; though it was better when it was across the street from my apartment :) I almost stopped by tonight on my way home from Ferris Bueller @ Yerba Buena.
Hey there, Bob.
Erlang might be 20 years old but some parts of it are still new such as SMP support which was just added last year. So it's not as cut and dried as it seems, I would argue.
Scala also reaches a developer community that Erlang can't: those who think that a modern type system can make your code more concise, expressive and safer. I've been reading your blog long enough to think you don't fall into that camp.
I certainly don't think it should be a Scala vs. Erlang argument, I would be happy to use either (or both!) in a commercial setting.
If it was just the concurrency wee all could go for stackless Python and happily hack away. Seemingly Stackless is able to get in ceartain areas the same performance of Erlang while keeping mutable data structures.
So besides pattern matching there must be some other reason for all of us being so fascinated by this language without decent packages, namespaces, shell and documentation.
I can't nail what it is, but for sure I'm fascinated.
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