[erlang-questions] Erlang for managers

[Torben Hoffmann]

Hi Martin,

You can have a look at a slide deck I created at one point:
http://www.slideshare.net/torbenhoffmann90/ndc-london-2014-erlang-patterns-matching-business-needs

The Golden Trinity of Erlang (s.24) is the key.

Fred has given a good explanation of the Zen of Erlang:
http://ferd.ca/the-zen-of-erlang.html

I think the "Building Microservices" by Sam Newman
(http://www.amazon.com/Building-Microservices-Sam-Newman/dp/1491950358/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450360939&sr=8-1&keywords=microservices)
has a very favourable mentioning of Erlang's ability to deliver on
microservices:
If you are a pure Erlang shop, the quality of Erlang's module
implementation may get you a very long way, but I suspect that many of
you are not in that situation.

For me one of the key business values of Erlang is that if you have done
your supervision tree well, then you can add new services to your system
without worrying. If you have created something that fails, the only
that part fails. The rest of your system continues.

This significantly reduces the risk of adding to your system.

You have to learn how to split things into smaller pieces, but that is a
sane advice in any language.

jlouis has some good remarks on this in
https://medium.com/this-is-not-a-monad-tutorial/interview-with-jesper-louis-andersen-about-erlang-haskell-ocaml-go-idris-the-jvm-software-and-b0de06440fbd#.6bm7lnb21

So smaller, indenpendent components that can fail on their own leads to
a higher innovation rate, which leads to money.

You can code just as fast in a lot of other languages, but the freedom
to make mistakes that Erlang lends you is worth so much more.

Feel free to reach out if you need a discussion about this.

Cheers,
Torben



Martin Hässler <mhssler@REDACTED> writes:

> [ text/plain ]
> My manager's new manager has asked me for a high level summary of Erlang
> compared with other languages, especially C and C++, an "Erlang for dummies"
> as she put it. I would like to call it "Erlang for managers" instead, as she
> is not a dummy.
>
> What are the best Erlang summaries for managers nowadays?
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-- 
Torben Hoffmann
Architect, basho.com
M: +45 25 14 05 38