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Comment by hota_mazi | Hacker News Reader

There are millions of lines of enterprise Java code running these days and a good chunk of these are using Java EE.

The trend has started moving away from it these past years but it's pretty clear that even the worst and early versions of Java EE (looking at you, EJB 2) have been used to power massive web sites and applications that are still in use today.

Erlang/OTP is nonexistent in comparison.

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Now, please, try to think about to what degree (how many orders of magnitude) the Whatsapp ecosystem, which has been build on top of OTP, are more efficient in terms of data throughput, resource usage (both memory and CPU cycles wasted on thread scheduling and looking and busy waiting) and reliability (think of Facebook Messanger too), how many times less lines of code it has, to what degree the code is less verbose, less repetitive and hence more readable and maintainable.

I could give you a hint: the whole standard library of Erlang is (including optional type declarations for each function)

   schiptsov@Ideapad:~/Compile/otp/lib/stdlib/src$ du -sh .
   2.6M	.

I do not have Java sources.

Processed junk food is absolutely dominant form of human nutrition in the world. Does this fact makes junk food better than evolved (carefully selected) traditional dishes of rural communities, adapted to the local food sources and seasons?

Yes, WhatsApp. Of course. The only successful platform using Erlang (although to what extent, not quite clear). What's also not clear is whether that platform would have been more successful or easier to design with another technology. We'll never know.

What we know is that, like I said, the number of Java EE projects out there absolutely dwarfs the number of Erlang projects. That was my one and only point. I never compared the quality of these two platforms, I just offered a simple mind share fact.

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