[erlang-questions] Distributed publish/subscribe system

[Jerome Martin]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 5:04 PM, Steve Vinoski <vinoski@REDACTED> wrote:

> 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! :-)
>

Why am I not surprised ? :-)


> 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.


Yes, and this is why I said I understand his business stance. Someone has to
maintain these systems now I suppose. However, advising to create some more
is a different thing. Well, that is unless if you specialize in maintenance
of said systems :-) (just a humorous remark, I am not accusing anyone of
anything there)


> 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.


<nod>

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.
>

Yes, in the same sense as I am happy to see functional idioms in python:
this is far from ideal, and brings only an order of magnitude less than the
benefits of pure FP. But it has the merit of exposing more people to FP, at
the risk or diluting it, just like smalltalk ideas have been diluted (and
the best ones mostly dropped) in "modern OO".

-- 
Jérôme Martin