ERLANG
from the outside
@bodil
I have no idea what I'm doing
Hello Joe?
Hello Goat
Gordon Guthrie (2002)
Why isn't Erlang more popular?
Kids today prefer Ruby and Node.js
Rails
No
More
Hey girl,
I wish you were asynchronous
so you'd give me a callback
The core tooling is simple yet sensational.
The community has enormous momentum.
A natural choice for web apps.
ISOMORPHIC JAVASCRIPT
It doesn't do concurrency
nearly as well as Erlang.
Nobody cares.
It works well enough.
Which languages are the most popular?
(on GitHub)
- JavaScript
- Java
- Ruby
Which languages are the most popular?
(according to TIOBE)
- Java
- C
- C++
- C#
- Objective-C
BIG ENTERPRISE
- Oracle
- AT&T
- Microsoft
- Apple
"The only reason Java has been accepted is because it is a product of a company that has made enormous advertisement for it." — Edsger W. Dijkstra
But Ericsson?
Java was launched by Sun as a flagship product.
Ericsson never really wanted Erlang.
MY JOURNEY
JavaScript is my professional career.
I know the JS ecosystem like no other.
I know where all the skeletons are buried.
I maintain a growing Node codebase.
This does not end well.
We had that in Erlang 25 years ago.
Learning Erlang
Read a book!
Some books are online but still books.
Advanced topics? Good luck!
Those books are long!
Erlang is not a complicated language!
(at least that's what Robert claims)
Elixir has a very decent tutorial.
Syntax
These are your father's parentheses.
Tooling
Tooling UX matters!
Where's the standard build tool?
Where's the standard package manager?
NO, MAKEFILES AREN'T OK
By the way, Elixir's tooling is rather neat.
rebar3
+ Hex
Community
SAID EASY
MEANT SIMPLE
A monad is just the dual of a comonad,
what's the problem?
We were smug about Erlang 25 years ago.
Everything useful was invented here.
Everything invented here is exactly right.
(Joe has assured me he's never wrong)
Why isn't Erlang more popular?
The Lisp weenie's perspective
Erlang gives you an edge. Why share?
Erlang is your secret weapon!
The Haskell weenie's perspective
Avoid success at all costs!
If everyone uses it,
you can't change anything.
If everyone uses it,
everyone looks as smart as you.
The Node weenie's perspective
The more people use it, the better it gets.
There's literally an NPM package for everything.
Including Erlang.
What can be done?
Stop resting on your laurels, because they won't support the weight.
There's a future for Erlang.
It's called Elixir.
Elixir does everything right.
Onboarding is smooth as kittens.
Tooling is modern and effective.
All the power of OTP and
none of the headache.
A modern language with a modern workflow.
But I think there's a future
for Erlang itself too.
Erlang remains the core which
makes everything else possible.
IF YOU STEP UP
YOUR GAME.
If not, you'll be BCPL to Elixir's C.
But I think this is already happening.
Embrace rebar3. It's your last, best hope.
Put everything in Hex.
The future is going to look a lot different from the Erlang of 25 years ago.
Whether it's Elixir or a modern Erlang,
it's going to be amazing.
Because we really did solve these problems 25 years ago,
now let's take over the world!
谢谢!
Thank you!
qatlho'!
@bodil