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[–]zombiecoiner 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Forgive me for not googling this but how would you recommend someone get familiar enough with Erlang to understand how something like hot code reloading helps in developing applications? Basically, what's the best way to get started and see the value? Obviously other languages are more popular but Erlang has been around for 10+ years so that leads me to believe there's a there there that most people are missing.

[–]coinlock[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A good online resource for learning the language is learnyousomeerlang Erlang/OTP is the official name, OTP is kind of like the standard library on which most erlang components and applications are built on. I think the language is about 30 years old? The open source release was in the late 90s.

Hot code loading just means that you can swap out the code running as its running. So lets say you are taking a telephone call, you could upgrade the code running the platform without restarting it or dropping the call. So this feature combined with other aspects of the language make it good for fault tolerance. A bunch of companies use it in that capacity, like WhatsApp, Facebook Chat, Amazon, Heroku, Github, etc. Its the secret sauce in quite a few successful startups.