[erlang-questions] What can I only do in Erlang?

Tyler Margison kolorahl@REDACTED
Wed Nov 5 01:31:35 CET 2014


I think the question that should be asked is not "what can I only do in
Erlang?" Theoretically, with enough time and development, anything you can
do in one language you could do in another. You could even write customer
parsers/interpreters/compilers to combine semantics and structures from
various languages, or to completely embed one language inside of another. I
believe that a more appropriate question would be "what does Erlang do
better than other languages?"

Echoing Mark, I would say the "let it crash" philosophy is definitely high
on the list. There's also the built-in means of communicating between
distributed nodes. I personally like Erlang's concept of processes, which I
don't see a lot of other languages natively implement, though other
languages are getting community add-ons for such behavior (like Akka and
Celluloid).

On Tue, Nov 4, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Mark Nijhof <mark.nijhof@REDACTED>
wrote:

> Cheeky, but the only thing you can do in Erlang and not in any other
> language is write Erlang code (except for Elixir I guess) ;)
>
> Besides that I think the whole let it crash philosophy is what makes
> Erlang stand-out from the others, most if not all language features do
> exist in other languages. And OTP is of course a huge corner stone that you
> don't find in many other languages.
>
> -Mark
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 1:18 AM, Curtis J Schofield (ram9) <curtis@REDACTED>
> wrote:
>
>> I am working on getting Erlang/Elixir adopted into our company. I've
>> been asked to provide a simple example of something that your can only
>> do in erlang.
>>
>> My reason for pushing to adopt this in our tech stack is that much of
>> the system code I've written I feel I could write easier in Erlang and
>> do it faster. I feel like one of the unique offerings of erlang
>> relates to distributed computing or OTP reliable systems.
>>
>>
>> Does anyone have thoughts on this question ? "What can I do in Erlang
>> that I can't do in another language?"
>>
>> Ideally it would be something small that I could use as a demonstration.
>>
>> Thank you for any thoughts.
>>
>> Curtis
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ---
>> Modern Yoga vs Traditional Yoga
>> http://swamij.com/traditional-yoga.htm#swamirama
>> _______________________________________________
>> erlang-questions mailing list
>> erlang-questions@REDACTED
>> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Mark Nijhof
> t:   @MarkNijhof <https://twitter.com/MarkNijhof>
> s:  marknijhof
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20141104/e6367e67/attachment.htm>


More information about the erlang-questions mailing list