[erlang-questions] What do you like the most about Erlang/OTP?

[Fred Hebert]

That's a tough one, because I want to avoid the general "processes! they 
good!"

1. Understandability

I don't mean 'readability'. I strongly believed the two concepts are 
somewhat exclusive. Poetry can be beautiful and fun to read, while not 
being able to understand the underlying meaning.

Erlang, through OTP, allows to break down application in quickly 
understandable parts. I can pick many OTP projects (given they're broken 
in OTP apps), check at the dependencies, and figure out what is the top 
level, what is lower-level, and break all the fragments individually 
into something manageable, that I can hold in my head.

This does mean easier maintainability, because pretty much all aspects 
of maintenance have 'understanding the code base' as a prerequisite. The 
easier things are to figure out, the better I am.

2. Growing a System

Through Fault tolerance and OTP apps allows me to keep a system 
functional even when imperfect or buggy. This is great because none of 
the software I write will be bug free, nor satisfactory to the customer 
in the first few iterations.

Being able to do hot code loading, shut down or restart only part of a 
node (due to OTP apps) during a deployment, inspect it while it runs, 
connect to various nodes, etc. is all awesome. And everything works with 
or without GUIs so I can check anything even from my smartphones, away 
from home, if things go wrong.

Overall I see it as a very good environment from a devops perspective.

On 12-08-27 4:34 PM, Loïc Hoguin wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am wondering what you guys like the most about Erlang/OTP, 
> especially newcomers, maybe it changed your life, allowed you to climb 
> the Everest (or at least sleep at night).
>
> I'll be synthesizing that into a few key points that I am hopeful will 
> be reusable by anyone wanting to sell Erlang to their 
> friends/work/clients.
>
> So help me by telling us what's so good about it!
>
> Thanks.
>