[erlang-questions] node.js vs erlang

[John Kemp]

On 06/19/2014 05:07 AM, Ivan Uemlianin wrote:
> Afaics nodejs is aimed squarely at people who (a) only know javascript,

What is wrong with that? Cowboy is aimed at people who know Erlang. 
Rails is aimed at people who know Ruby.

Personally, I program in several languages, including Javascript. I 
found node easy to write because of my Javascript experience, mostly 
because of how callbacks are used. But I don't "only know Javascript".

> and (b) don't want to learn any other programming languages.  For this
> market segment, I can certainly imagine nodejs is very exciting.

Eh?

I try to regularly evaluate new languages and platforms to use, and I 
doubt I'm the only person who does that.

Node was exciting (to me) because it promised a nice solution to the 
I/O-bound scenarios which (I think) Aaron described in pretty good 
detail. "Event-driven, non-blocking I/O, server-side Javascript". Node 
delivers on those fronts, just like it says it does. It doesn't matter 
that there are better things out there (for some definition of better). 
Yes, there is hype around node. And yes, it has problems too. But the 
platform does have benefits.

Disparaging the platform or the people who use it seems less than 
helpful. Helping aid in the understanding of how Erlang compares to node 
may be more helpful.

- johnk

>
> On 19/06/2014 09:52, Loïc Hoguin wrote:
>> On 06/19/2014 08:50 AM, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
>>> by doing those 3 things, nodejs can have a steep learning curve and
>>> still
>>> succeed in getting lots of users.
>>
>> That's another thing I don't understand. People always say nodejs has
>> lots of users. Yet I haven't heard of a single success story.
>>
>> Erlang, you don't have to look far. Most big companies use Erlang. Half
>> the world's phone communications go through Erlang. You can find Erlang
>> in space. Heck even npm, the nodejs package manager, uses Erlang.
>>
>> So my question then is: on what is the hype built? It certainly doesn't
>> seem to be built on the capabilities of the platform. I doubt it's
>> because it has one short example on its front page either. It probably
>> *helps* but it's not *why* there's hype about it.
>>
>> If you want to attract hypey people you have to build hype around
>> Erlang, and that's much harder because you can't just hop in, everything
>> is different and you have to restart learning from scratch. As simple as
>> an example you might put on its front page, it will not get the point
>> across as well as one for a familiar language.
>>
>