[erlang-questions] Distributed publish/subscribe system

[Steve Vinoski]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 4:59 AM, Jerome Martin <tramjoe.merin@REDACTED> wrote:
> Wouldn't using this defeat the whole purpose of moving beyond the RPC model,
> and leverage what Erlang has to offer, as described
> here<http://armstrongonsoftware.blogspot.com/2008/05/road-we-didnt-go-down.html>and
> there <http://steve.vinoski.net/pdf/IEEE-RPC_Under_Fire.pdf> ? To re-quote
> Steve Vinoski after Joe Armstrong:
>
> *"What all those years of CORBA taught me, BTW, is that RPC, for a*
> *number of reasons, is generally A Really Bad Idea."*

I couldn't agree more! :-)

In Malcolm's defense, though, there's still a lot of CORBA out there,
a fair amount of it in embedded systems, and it's not going anywhere
anytime soon. For example, to the best of my knowledge certain
telecommunications interfaces required by law are based on CORBA. A
dozen years ago at the height of CORBA we always predicted it would
still be in use in 2020, and so far it seems we might have been fairly
accurate with that prediction. Malcolm and folks like him specialize
in helping folks who have no choice but to maintain such systems try
to fit it together with newer technologies changing and advancing
around it. I'm happy to see Malcolm and his colleagues trying to bring
Erlang into such systems in order to reduce maintenance costs, enhance
functionality, and improve integration capabilities -- I think we
should encourage more of that.

--steve