Eric Merritt

Pradeep bhatt wrote:Sorry for the typo. I meant write ,not right.

What are the alternatives to Erlang?

That depends on what you mean by alternatives. Erlang is a general purpose language so in that sense it can fit in where any other language can fit in. However, if you mean what are the alternatives that provide process isolation, message passing, massive concurrency, etc. Well there really isn't any. None that provide a similar combination of features as Erlang.

There are others that provide Massive Concurrency (Haskell, Gambit Scheme, Mozart-Oz, etc), but not that have this same unique combination of features.

Well I can't really explain it any more then any one else. This is the perennial question around languages, there are a very small number of main stream languages. Those languages tend to look very much like C and be very imperative.

Erlang is neither of those things, so that seems to mean that it has a poor chance of becoming mainstream. However, all that means is that its not mainstream. Erlang is a good language with a large number of great libraries, its well supported, has a very good community, has been used in production for many years and it lets you handle certain types of large scale problems very easily. Very few other languages can compare for those types of problems. That recommends it well to me. The fact that its not mainstream just gives those people that are using it a competitive advantage over those that are not.

[quote=Pradeep bhatt][quote=Richard Carlsson]It is probably still true that Erlang is not that widely used within the telecom industry in general (but it's also hard to get good statistics about this, since these companies don't like to tell anyone what they're using in their products). The reasons for not using it seem to be the usual: fear and doubt, Not Invented Here Syndrome, "we'll wait until everyone else is using it first", and so on. But there have been some experience stories from other telecom companies lately, though; for example, there was a presentation from Motorola at the Erlang User Conference yesterday.

I'd just like to point out that Erlang/OTP being "made for telecom applications" is not quite right. Telecom systems were definitely the initial use case, but at the same time, telecom systems are really all about communication and control. There is nothing anywhere in Erlang itself that says "telecom", but there is a whole lot that says "parallellism", "fault tolerance", "supervision", "hardware control", "communication", "low latency", "soft realtime", "always-on", etc. This fits a whole range of problems that pretty much everybody has to think about nowadays when computer networks are everywhere.
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From Arjun it looks Erlang existed for 30 years. Why people have not used it because " "we'll wait until everyone else is using it first" are passe ? [/quote]


I am not quite sure what question you are asking Pradeep. Is it the idea that Erlang has been around for awhile (25 years or so in its very earliest form, but more like 11 in the latest) and isn't a mainstream language that has you concerned?

Let me back up Richard and say that Erlang is a general purpose language and in no way geared towards the telecom industry. I have been using Erlang for years and have never been involved in Telecom.

Erlang is a very good choice for a broad range of applications, it just so happens to have been born in the telecom industry.

Mashruf Zaman wrote:I have downloaded the chapters. I have no idea what Erlang is! I will try to find it out.
And who don't want to win a free copy?

Mashruf,

You probably want to get up to speed on Erlang before you dive into our book. Its geared more towards folks that have already read one of the other introductory books out there. Joe Armstrong's book is an excellent choice. That said, if you just want to dive right in pay a lot of attention to chapter 2.

Thanks guys, we are all happy to be here and are more then happy to try and answer any questions that you guys have for us!