Code Monkeyism

Programming is hard by Stephan Schmidt

July 9, 2008

The Erlang hype is grotesque

Take for example this recent post on hacker news with the title “Amazon and Google Discover Erlang (IMDB is switching from Perl to Erlang)”. There in the comments someone gives a source for the IMDB claim: “IMDb on Java/Erlang (a job posting)”. Going to the job listing results in

We are currently working in Perl but have plans to use Java, Erlang and any other language that we think will suit our purposes.

Constructing an “IMDB is switching from Perl to Erlang” (though everything is better than Perl) out of this job listing is grotesque.

As a side node, I’ve been looking into Erlang for some time but I’m still undecided. With some functional style in Java, Kilim, Terracotta and a Supervisor modul (see Scala), I guess most of the Erlang failover/distribution stuff can be done in Java too. I’m interested in CouchDB, but I have no reliability numbers and performance is said to be very low (for now?). The feature set of CouchDB is compelling though.

Ah in the end I only wish for some more functions in Java, better separation of concerns, constructors which can return any type instance, syntactic sugar like in Groovy, structural interfaces, enforced nice-style non-null references, catch(E1,E2,E3) … well well well. I’ll better stop before this turns into another How-to-improve-Java rant.

About the author: Stephan Schmidt is currently a team manager at ImmobilienScout24 in Berlin. Stephan has been working as a head of development and CTO. He has used a lot of different technologies in the last 20 years including Java, Rails and Python. Stephans main field of interest is maintainablity and productivity in software development. Want to know more? All views are only his own.

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Comments

Jan

Check out the CouchDB developer’s reply to the performance: http://damienkatz.net/2007/12/couchdb_perform_1.html

In addition: Things are sub-par now but are resolved easily and will be soon.

Cheers
Jan
–

July 9th, 2008
Alain O'Dea

Stephan, you are correct that it is unreasonable to read that IMDb is switching to Erlang based on that job posting. You are also right about the hype. It really does a disservice to a language to promote it with hyperbole and misrepresentations.

This is a sensible criticism of the blog post no hacker news. I will keep it in mind and restrain my own enthusiasm to realistic levels as I present Erlang to people.

July 10th, 2008
stephan

@Jan: Thanks I’ll take a look.

July 10th, 2008
stephan

Looks promising what Damien says.

I won’t use Erlang - it’s not my style - but Erlang applications with distribution and failover look interesting. I would prefer Couch DB - especially as I’m heavily into SOFEA - to MySQL anytime.

July 10th, 2008
Reedo

What’s also unreasonable, etc. is flatly stating “everything is better than Perl”. If that were true, Perl would never have existed, y’know…it still has a userbase and it continues to improve (Perl 5, I mean. Perl 6 is a different language.). However, I’ll gladly concede that many options are better than Perl for many tasks.

July 10th, 2008
stephan

@Reedo:

From a software engineering point of view with software development as a team effort, yes “everything is better than Perl”. From my perspective most Perl efforts are one man shows because of Perls programming style.

I’ve canned several Perl projects because the lead developer left and the code was not understandable to the newly hired Perl guy.

The last bastion for Perl was shell skripting, if awk and grep isn’t good enough. Today I use mainly Ruby for that though.

July 11th, 2008
Jack9

“If that were true, Perl would never have existed”

You’re confusing axioms.

Everything has always been better than Perl != Everything is better than Perl.

Everything is better than ADA. It was good for its time and produced tools and concepts that led to better languages.

August 14th, 2008

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