The Erlang hype is grotesque

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
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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.

@Jan: Thanks I’ll take a look.

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.

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.

@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.

“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.