[erlang-questions] Erlang is the best choice for building commercial application servers

[Ulf Wiger]

On 14 Mar 2012, at 03:44, Richard O'Keefe wrote:

> 	You cannot make a reliable system by *extending* an
> 	unreliable system.


Hmm, I guess that depends on what you read into the word 'extending'.

Erlang processes are unreliable, but supervision structures, which build on erlang processes, are more reliable.

A system of erlang nodes can be more reliable than a singe node.

A pair of computers in a redundant configuration can be more reliable than a single computer.

In essense, one *always* builds reliable (complex) systems out of less reliable parts.

That said, Erlang has some very nice *fundamental* facilities to enable this, and adding fault-tolerance as an afterthought in other languages is likely as hard as adding strong static type checking to Erlang - that is, it can be done, and has been done to quite some extent, but those who have worked in a language where it was envisioned from the start will argue that it's a pale copy of the Real Thing.

BR,
Ulf W
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