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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

Oh, hey again. :)

And yes I work mostly with Elixir for years and Erlang's model is just irreplaceable so far. You're quite right that everything is synchronous but all the Erlang "processes" (green threads, fibers or w/e people want to call them) are preemptively and forcibly switched. And that has basically eliminated 95% of all parallel programming problems.

I would kill for Erlang's concurrency / parallel primitives in Rust, especially if they come with their own DSL (likely via Rust proc macros?) and are much shorter and comprehensible than they are right now. :|

> It essentially gets you all of the complexity of interrupt driven code for very little gain

Yep, sadly. I've written some fairly impressive commercial Rust code but it added gray hairs and left me wondering whether that was the best way to do it.

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In a way it really gets me: we have a very good solution and yet everybody is pushing their own novel footguns with gusto. Baffling, really when you think about it. I'm trying to imagine civil engineering with entirely new ways to design bridges every 4 months, different materials that are entirely untested but this time we'll get it right and so on. That's roughly the state of the software world.

Oh don't even get me started on this, I start fuming just by reading your comments because they often align very closely with my thinking (in other threads as well).

I really think we should all pull up our sleeves and e.g. make transpilers from TLA+ to every mainstream language. (Provided we first made sure TLA+'s parallel logic is exhaustive and flawless, of course.)

I too get super ticked off these days. The programmers at large are constantly running in circles and almost nobody seems to care and everyone loves to pretend that this is exactly how things should be... Argh!

It isn't a well received opinion, but this kind of stuff, like in other engineering domains, can only be fixed by liability and regulation.

Most people (and companies), don't care for quality unless ignoring at it comes with a fine.

Liability is the big one. As soon as that kicks in a lot of this absolutely irresponsible stuff will stop.

Regulation would still be playing catch up but being liable, preferably all the way to the people involved including directors, could be done pretty fast and would set us on the path to licensed software engineer in short order.

Indeed, and the "what about the poor FOSS developer" isn't something I buy in.

The small little street bazaar salesperson, the little corner shop, big shopping mall, whatever, all of them are liable and manage to make their business just as well.

Keep an eye on gleam lang if you’re not already. It’s a language with an ML inspired type system (like rust) that compiles to erlang. It is likely too nascent to be used in production (in terms of tooling, ecosystem, stability, etc).

https://gleam.run

I do already keep an eye on it and I like its syntax a lot. Problem is that the current commercial Elixir ecosystem is very strongly gravitating towards web and API development where several libraries reign supreme (Phoenix [web framework] and many of its dependents and derivatives, plus Absinthe [GraphQL] and Ecto [databases]). They also heavily rely on Elixir's macros so Gleam has quite a lot of work to do before it gains any tangible switching-over power.

To be honest... I am more likely to learn Golang more deeply (I know it quite well already but haven't, like, programmed in it in production for a long time, I am mostly using it for my own scripting and personal project needs) or even dive into OCaml now that it has a multithreaded runtime.

I do like how enthusiastically people make new languages but IMO most of them should be absorbed back into the hivemind at one point. This huge fragmentation does not help anything (except maybe teach you a technique or two which is of course very valuable by itself).

I think part of this is the ego component: it's much more fun to make a relatively big contribution to something new than it is to fix a small part of something much larger.

That, plus many programmers are former nerds who just love tinkering with stuff and they invent languages as thought experiments. Which is 100% cool with me but it gets weird when they start to promote them...

And figuring out the gap between "wanting to tinker" and "being a reliable paid professional" is a big struggle that takes a while to figure out -- and maybe takes your entire life in maintaining a good balance between both.

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