[erlang-questions] Erlang bugs - Beginners Guide to Erlang (equanimity.nl) - ycombinator

[giovanni_re]

A Beginners Guide to Erlang (equanimity.nl)
113 points by wardb 2 days ago | 7 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5798254
http://blog.equanimity.nl/blog/2013/05/29/a-beginners-guide-to-erlang/

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andrewparker 2 days ago | link This is a great page, but it assumes that
I (the reader) am already certain I want to invest time learning Erlang.
I think it would be valuable if the author would open the page with a
brief paragraph on why it's worth investing the time to learn Erlang and
some of its tradeoffs vs other languages.

reply

501 1 day ago | link Collating all the tradeoffs and bugbears would
benefit both the existing community and newcomers. Things that bug me
that immediately come to mind:

* No public bug tracker

* epmd's security (or lack thereof)

* Can't insist that epmd be started separately (`erl -no_epmd` won't
start epmd but it also won't start epmd's gen_server)

* Can't swap out epmd because while `erl -epmd_module foo` is there,
`net_kernel:epmd_module()` is barely used. (Although I don't think it's
interface is documented anyway)

* No built-in way to hook UNIX signals

* While the documentation itself is pretty good, it's presentation is
lacking and it's difficult to quickly correct mistakes as you run into
them

* It can be difficult to reason about when a shared binary will be
garbage collected

* OS packaging (I'm thinking of Debian/Ubuntu) of Erlang and Erlang apps
tends to be more harmful than helpful (old packages, namespace
conflicts, etc)


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