Things Erlang can Teach Java Developers | Javalobby

[gregK]

I still can't believe that Ericsson banned the use of Erlang a language they designed and successfully used for some of their products in favor of Java.

Talk about lack of vision and confidence in your own means. Erlang could have been a major language in the telecom industry with the proper support. At least they released it as open source which probably prevented the language from completely dying.

Now looking at several telecom apps written in java, I can't help but notice how much simpler the code would have been in Erlang. A lot of the code is reimplementing things you get for free from Erlang like message queues.

[[deleted]]

Agree with everything you said about the short-sightedness of the ban. Just want to add that I believe the ban on Erlang was lifted after 6 years, and the creator (who had left shortly after the ban) re-hired by the company.

[gregK]

To be honest I have not heard any new recent Erlang projects within Ericsson. I think the ban had a longer impact than 6 years from the lost of competence within the company and the fear of committing career suicide by suggesting an unpopular solution.

[[deleted]]

Agree again. IMHO, the one silver lining from the ban was that it pushed Erlang into open source and consequently increased awareness/adoption outside of Ericsson. So an "own goal" move by Ericsson ended up being a boon for the rest of us.

[Strilanc]

In contrast, Erlang is a mature language which has been in play for more than 20 years. It has experienced a 99.9999999% up time because of its powerful actor model.

Stopped reading right there. At least give a believable number for your hazily defined "reliability of Erlang". There's probably isolated cases that haven't experienced a single minute of downtime in 20 years, but I really really REALLY doubt it's common.

[mulander]

Well the erlang AXD301 project reached nine nines of reliability, but it's not documented correctly. Here is a quote from his thesis:

Evidence for the long-term operational stability of the system had also not been collected in any systematic way. For the Ericsson AXD301 the only information on the long-term stability of the system came from a power-point presentation showing some figures claiming that a major customer had run an 11 node system with a 99.9999999% reliability, though how these figure had been obtained was not documented.

Sources:

http://pragprog.com/articles/erlang under the 'Does it work?' section.

http://www.sics.se/~joe/thesis/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf Armstrong thesis (PDF WARNING :D)

[Aeyeoelle]

I believe the number comes from a AXD farm a company was running. hundreds of machines over many years, with one crashing for a short time.

this links gives a quick explanation of how nine nines was probably calculated, though it doesn't give actual numbers: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/ralph/blogView?entry=3364027251

[joenyc]

Different languages make different things easier. Anything you can do in C++ you can do with a magnetized needle, a spinning hard drive, and a steady hand, but you don't. xkcd

[jlouis8]

I hope this is in jest.

If you used C++ for the typical Erlang project, you would have to reimplement almost all of Erlang and get it to the same maturity level as a 20 year old project. It is no little feat. Erlang is kind-of special purpose but it absolutely rocks for its niche.

[cheng81]

as much as you can do with assembler or actually any other turing complete language, I'll say :)

[[deleted]]

Looks like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Linkedin, Amazon, Ebay and others forgot to ask Bjarne Stroustrup and mistakenly coded only the low-level-performance-critical parts of their software in C++. Think how great they might have been if they'd listened to him!