[erlang-questions] Erlang or OCaml

[Bob Ippolito]

On 10/15/07, Lone Wolf <hubaghdadi@REDACTED> wrote:
> Hi.
> Recently, I have been trying to learn a language other than Java.
> Erlang seems to be ready for the prime time (used in the commercial world).
> On the other side, OCaml seems to be a cool and capable language.
> I want to learn something useful and fun.
> Tell what do you think ?
> (if you are Erlang die-hard, please put this aside ;))
>

When I was evaluating Python alternatives for building the core
technology behind MochiAds I tried out a bunch of languages and Erlang
was the only one that was easy for me to learn and had the right
balance of features, performance, and reliability. A year later we
have about 16 machines running 80 Erlang nodes powering about 16
different "components" of our infrastructure and 4 people working on
it at the moment (originally it was just me). It worked out so well
that we rewrote the server component of our MochiBot service in Erlang
and we've been using it to build lots of internal tools such as our
monitoring software, our single sign-on service, etc. as well. None of
us had previous Erlang experience, but we're all very comfortable with
it now.

After about a year with Erlang, I'm not sure I could part with hot
code loading, light-weight processes, and multiplexed socket IO for
writing servers. Also, Mnesia has been really useful to us to
temporarily store "real-time" data (ram_copies) so that we don't have
to make users wait for it to get batched into the SQL databases. The
distribution stuff mostly Just Works once you figure out how to set it
up (though we did have one bad experience with a network partition due
to a switch acting up, it was recoverable manually).

O'Caml is a useful language too, but for writing a network app I can't
really imagine going with anything but Erlang if you're looking for
redundancy and scale. Unless you want to write your own half-baked
Erlang-like system before even trying to solve something a little
closer to your actual problem domain.

-bob