Thursday, August 17, 2006

#1 on programming.reddit.com

Wow, now this is very cool: my article from yesterday, Why Erlang Is A Great Language for Concurrenct Programming, is now #1 on programming.reddit.com. Woot! :)







When I started blogging about Erlang, I never thought it would generate much interest among the larger developer community. I seriously thought, "Erlang so is great, but (relatively) few people use it. I guess people are just not interested in Erlang's benefits, or maybe they are just too attached to OO or procedural languages and they will never be interested in a functional language like Erlang, no matter how great it is."



It looks like I was wrong. I've been getting some great feedback about my Erlang postings, and much of it came from non-Erlangers who've become interested in Erlang just from reading about it in my blog. And now, since my article has reached the #1 spot on programming.reddit.com, I know that Erlang strikes a chord among many developers who are looking for a better -- and more fun :) -- way of creating software.



Side note: it was a strange yet pleasant surprise to see that my article is 5 spots ahead of an article on Paul Graham's website, History of T (Paul Graham didn't write it, though). I'm a big fan of Paul Graham's essays. I've read his book, Hackers and Painters, which is a collection of his essays, from cover to cover. I link to Paul Graham's essays in almost every "long" article I write. I recommend Hackers and Painters to everybody who thinks programming is more than the implementation of specs handed down to you by a suit :)

7 comments:

Frank said...

Congratulations. Your blog is very intresting and I think you deserve this. I think you're writing about Erlang comes at just the right moment as everybody on programming.reddit has read all that Lisp, Ruby, Haskell (PG+defmacro+DHH+Yegge...) and is kind of looking for the next level. At least it's that way with me..

But please do your readers and yourself a favor and stop quoting Paul Graham in every post. I mean "yes he's a smart guy", "yes I read all his essay", but in the current post he's mentioned 4 times and his book 2 times! and I'm getting kinda sick of every webkiddy (by which I don't mean you) referencing to their buddy PG. Please try reducing this - I think your better than that.

Yariv said...

Thanks for the feedback, Frank. Yes, I see your point about quoting Paul Graham too much. My thinking is usually "this is for people who've never read my blog before, and they would know about Paul Graham's essays." Am I over-doing it? Maybe :) Thanks for the comment. Maybe I'll "take it easy" in the future.

Jonathan said...

I really appreciate the articles, Yariv. They've been scratching a big itch for me.

I've been planning on starting a start-up in a year or two when I'm done with school. I had been messing around with Lisp with that in mind, but I've had some concerns about the viability of using Lisp now that parallel systems are becoming the norm. I know that theres work being done on Lisp's threading and network programming issues, but I also have been exploring other options.

As I've been doing my programming languages research, I was intrigued by Erlangs approach to the parallel processing problem. I've been specifically looking for a functional language that has good support for parallel processing and that scales well. A decent set of libraries for web programming wouldn't hurt.

After reading your articles, I'm definitely going to give Erlang + Yaws a long hard look. This might be just what the doctor ordered. Thanks for the tips.

Keep up the good work, I'll be reading.

Frank said...

I see good your intention to hint people to more good ressources, but as I wrote I think you got a bit carried away. Just "take it easy" as your wrote :) and keep up the great work. I hope I find some time to take a look at yaws.

Yariv said...

Btw, I know that Yaws doesn't have all libraries that Rails has, especially in the DB abstraction layer area. This is a big weakness, because If you read some of my past postings, you'll see why I don't think Mnesia is suitable for high-load websites. However, don't let this discourage you from using Yaws because help is on the way :) I'll be doing some work in this area that I will release as open source in the next few weeks.

Simon said...

This is great Erlang evangelism. Keep it up! :-)

And I don't think that it's possible to over-quote Paul Graham.

Yariv said...

Thanks Simon! Keep reading my blog for more Erlang related goodies :)