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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Possibly in the past, yes. But if they're now just paying 1ms in GC every so often, the advantage is now gone. Go is generally faster than Erlang (in Go-native vs. Erlang-native code) so the system is quite possibly net outperforming what Erlang can do now. 1ms is just noise when packet latency jitter is higher than that.

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That is not the point. The advantage of Erlang is not raw speed, but the sheer amount of language constructs helping you write distributed system without thinking too much about low-level stuff.

If I had to do some parallel data crunching, I would probably use Go or something similar. To write an actual system, it's much easier just to stand on the shoulders of Erlang guys instead of developing everything by hand(i.e. whole supervision tree).

Well, there's one less thing for Go programmers to worry about now.

The problem with being a language advocate is than when "competing" languages improve you start thinking it's bad news for your side. I try to avoid that. If Go improves it's good news for everyone, if only because we all benefit from stronger competition.

I do not feel like a language advocate. Go is great language for a number of appliances and its growing popularity shows it. I didn't have time yet to tinker with it myself, but I certainly intend to.

My point was that strength of Erlang/OTP was never in processing power/speed, but in designing the runtime so it actually solves most problems regarding distribution. Go, as far as I understand it, was created with different goal in mind - to enable fast and parallel processing. It does not make it better or worse, just different. What I'm saying is that solving garbage collection issue (and only partially, when we're at it) is not what makes in competitive in comparison to Erlang, because Erlang was designed with totally different goal in mind.

The advantage of language constructs helping you, but the disadvantage of finding devs to actually build with them.

I learnt Elixir myself, on the job. It's certainly doable. Actually, if I ever had to hire developers, I wouldn't care at all about their previous language experiences. The only thing you achieve asking for n years experience in y is discouraging talented people who worked on something else.

The thing is, you choose right tech for the job and then reserve some time to bring everybody up to speed. From my own experience it is much cheaper than trying to use already know tech in ways it was not designed to work.

> The advantage of language constructs helping you, but the disadvantage of finding devs to actually build with them.

The flip side of that coin is you're liable to get someone reinventing the wheel - poorly - in whatever language doesn't have all those goodies.

Yep, Greenspun's tenth rule comes to mind.

In the Erlang world, we call that Virding's rule:

"Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Erlang."

Edit: I'll add, though, that the Go people are pretty smart and seem like they're doing good things, so I wouldn't be too complacent in thinking Erlang is the only game in town. It still does get some things right that are hard to replicate in Go, though.

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