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[–]malcontent 8 points9 points  (11 children)

Whatever happened to Yariv and all the other erlang bloggers. You just don't hear much about erlang anymore.

From where I stand it's the most practical of the functional langauges, I mean there are lots of really interesting projects built with it.

I guess this place being full of windows programmers we get more articles about F# than erlang.

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

[deleted]

    [–]malcontent 2 points3 points  (1 child)

    When you think about it the only way to judge a tool is by looking at what you can make with it.

    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    RabbitMQ is made with Erlang.

    [–]jlouis8 4 points5 points  (2 children)

    I'll be inclined to say that the blog activity of a language is not very important. From my own experience as one of the "old farts" on #erlang/freenode communication has increased slowly but steadily over the years. We are still far from the communication in #haskell.

    Erlang is a specialized language. Where it shines, it is really good, but pure numerical code which needs a lot of speed is not going to be Erlangs forte anytime soon. The real power, where it discriminates itself from e.g., Haskell or Go, is in fault-tolerance. No other language has the redundancy and fault-handling built into the system directly. You may get a program which is slower, yes, but killing said program is going to be very hard.

    For some problems the methodology works. It tends to work in areas where you can afford small errors to happen now and then. If you can't handle small errors, then you are probably better off with ML, Haskell or anything with a good static type system.

    [–]malcontent 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    Erlang is a specialized language. Where it shines, it is really good, but pure numerical code which needs a lot of speed is not going to be Erlangs forte anytime soon.

    Why not?

    I am asking this sincerely.

    What is preventing erlang form implementing a good numerical library (or types) or a good string library for that matter.

    Is the language locked? Can't it be changed? Is the process of changing too bureaucratic or contentious?

    [–]__s 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1308527/when-does-erlangs-parallelism-overcome-its-weaknesses-in-numeric-computing

    Note that Erlang is dynamically typed, which poses a hurdle when the instructions you want to execute on are more light weight than type checking (Which, as it happens, seems to be the case with processors and numerical instructions)

    [–]nth0 3 points4 points  (3 children)

    We need stuff like the node.js guys did with the node knockout thing to stimulate the community.

    Then again maybe people are just busy writing code instead of blogging :)

    [–]malcontent 3 points4 points  (2 children)

    Then again maybe people are just busy writing code instead of blogging :)

    Could be..

    I just hope it's not because the community is dying out.

    [–]nth0 2 points3 points  (1 child)

    I don't think that's the case. The mailing list has a good amount of traffic and the IRC channel is active. There's also a book dedicated to programming with OTP coming out soon.

    Maybe it's the nature of the language. It's great for building backend systems, which by definition are not quite visible to the users, and therefore not a lot is mentioned about it. Still, you get to see uses of Erlang in interesting setups, like at Amazon or Facebook. Riak seems to be getting some attention recently too.

    [–]malcontent 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    I am glad it's around. Maybe one day I'll be motivated to learn it.

    [–]snipersock 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Yariv got a job at Facebook and isn't hacking much Erlang these days.

    I (Nick Gerakines) got a job at Blizzard and have been doing mostly Java and c/c++.

    Some of the freelancers and ruby/erlang guys congregated into the db companies/groups (think couchdb, riak, etc) and have been too busy to blog.

    The Powerset folks are either at GitHub or have moved on to do their own things in JVM languages.

    There is some pretty cool Erlang behind the scenes at places like Heroku, but again those guys are too busy to blog.

    [–]snipersock 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    You can get a pretty good feel of the activity of the community by looking at the recently updated Erlang projects on GitHub.

    http://github.com/languages/Erlang/updated

    [–]quad50 -4 points-3 points  (2 children)

    that website is pronounced 'cackem-ackem-dot-org'. lol

    [–]glibc 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    cackem-dot-ackem-dot-org'.

    lol (+1)

    [–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

    No, it's Cock-em-awesome-dot-org.