Why Everyone Is Talking About Node: The very smart guys at Joyent are packaging it and pitching it perfectly.
The mobile platform has been gaining steam and so real-time interaction is becoming more important. Joyent was smart enough to see this & find a way to put their current infrastructure (lots and lots of invested $$) right into the middle of this. Node is well packaged as a solution to this. Very smart.
No doubt Node is the right solution for a lot of problems. And the guys working on it are very smart. But personally, I think that Node and Erlang compare somewhat like Lisp and C. At least at this point...
Actually, I meant it the other way around; what's popular isn't necessarily what's better.
I personally like coding in Erlang more than JS. I also personally feel the smart technology choice is Erlang -- it scales better. For me, Erlang is an easy choice, but I know that other people have different priorities that make Node the right choice.
I believe that the biggest thing holding Erlang back in this role is the fact that it's functional rather than imperative & that the syntax isn't C like. It's a complexity that many don't find worth the trouble.
I think the main thing holding erlang back is its community culture, its source may have been open, but it was not an "open source" project until very recently, some might say it still isnt, the good news is that it is changing.
The OTP team moved erlang to github so people can see and contribute to its development.
The OTP team are moving erlangs infrastructure to open tools (the tests are switching to common test) which helps outside contribution a lot.
Community contributions are starting to pick up, http://erlagner.org/ is finally a package manager that has been picked up by the community, http://learnyousomeerlang.com/ is an awesome set of beginner tutorials, http://erldocs.com/ (mine) is an easy way to browse the documentation.
Node is a lot younger but is already more mature than erlang in all the areas above, erlang is playing catch up in these regards, but it has a much more solid base.
I'm not saying anything (pos or negative) about node.js, but regarding erlang syntax, i'll make (circumstantial) arguments that erlang really is not complex:
- the pattern matching syntax of erlang, F#, ocaml and haskell is similar (obviously the 4 differ in a lot of details, but it's getting harder to avoid all 4 langs round these parts (HN)
- I don't have the stats in front of me, but if you look at LoC counts for the erlang killer apps (rabbitMQ, CouchDB, riak the dynamo clone, ejabberd etc) I think you'll see that the core functionality is usually a small number of thousands rather than 10K's of LoC.
(Looking for LoC stats, ohloh doesn't back me up, they show e.g. 180k for ejabberd, 18k for riak ... where the heck are LoC stats in github?
Comments
Why Everyone Is Talking About Node: The very smart guys at Joyent are packaging it and pitching it perfectly.
The mobile platform has been gaining steam and so real-time interaction is becoming more important. Joyent was smart enough to see this & find a way to put their current infrastructure (lots and lots of invested $$) right into the middle of this. Node is well packaged as a solution to this. Very smart.
No doubt Node is the right solution for a lot of problems. And the guys working on it are very smart. But personally, I think that Node and Erlang compare somewhat like Lisp and C. At least at this point...
It seems you suggest that Node is Lisp and Erlang is C.
Would you mind elaborate why?
Actually, I meant it the other way around; what's popular isn't necessarily what's better.
I personally like coding in Erlang more than JS. I also personally feel the smart technology choice is Erlang -- it scales better. For me, Erlang is an easy choice, but I know that other people have different priorities that make Node the right choice.
I believe that the biggest thing holding Erlang back in this role is the fact that it's functional rather than imperative & that the syntax isn't C like. It's a complexity that many don't find worth the trouble.
[edit] for clarity & less flame
I think the main thing holding erlang back is its community culture, its source may have been open, but it was not an "open source" project until very recently, some might say it still isnt, the good news is that it is changing.
The OTP team moved erlang to github so people can see and contribute to its development.
The OTP team are moving erlangs infrastructure to open tools (the tests are switching to common test) which helps outside contribution a lot.
Community contributions are starting to pick up, http://erlagner.org/ is finally a package manager that has been picked up by the community, http://learnyousomeerlang.com/ is an awesome set of beginner tutorials, http://erldocs.com/ (mine) is an easy way to browse the documentation.
Node is a lot younger but is already more mature than erlang in all the areas above, erlang is playing catch up in these regards, but it has a much more solid base.
I'm not saying anything (pos or negative) about node.js, but regarding erlang syntax, i'll make (circumstantial) arguments that erlang really is not complex:
- the pattern matching syntax of erlang, F#, ocaml and haskell is similar (obviously the 4 differ in a lot of details, but it's getting harder to avoid all 4 langs round these parts (HN)
- I don't have the stats in front of me, but if you look at LoC counts for the erlang killer apps (rabbitMQ, CouchDB, riak the dynamo clone, ejabberd etc) I think you'll see that the core functionality is usually a small number of thousands rather than 10K's of LoC.
(Looking for LoC stats, ohloh doesn't back me up, they show e.g. 180k for ejabberd, 18k for riak ... where the heck are LoC stats in github?