Erlang and High-Scale System Software

perspectives.mvdirona.com

16 pointsneilc5 comments

what is it with the constant talk of scalability these days? scalability isn't to do with a certain language or platform, it's just due to good efficient design.

Some languages and platforms are designed with scalability in mind. Erlang forces you to write code in terms of message passing between shared-nothing processes, which means that when you need to scale to multiple cores / machines your code is already designed to do so. Google AppEngine severely restricts the kind of operations you can perform (no File I/O, a persistence engine that doesn't even support aggregate queries) which means that you are forced to design your application in a way that scales.

I'm of the opinion that languages/platforms shouldn't force programmers to do things. It should be the other way around.

Generally, it is. Just wording / thinking of it the wrong way.

New languages and tools arise because of need. Therefore, if you feel forced or uncomfortable with your current tools & languages, use different ones.

People who feel forced and don't understand the particular programming model of Erlang shouldn't be using it. That simple. Google App Engine... that's another story...

Yes, but certain languages and platforms facilitate it more than others do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com