rossj

If you have any ideas/suggestions for how this might be implemented in CKAN, please do drop a mail to the list ( https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/ckan-dev ) or add an issue at https://github.com/ckan/ideas-and-roadmap/issues for discussion.

I guess one difference is the approach to concurrency. Node is still (as far as I am aware) single thread per process, and so tends to take the approach of using multiple processes (so that multiple cores are used) and some form of IPC.

Elixir (because Erlang) handles the distributing of 'processes' (not operating system processes but Erlang lightweight process) across cores for you. Erlang's been doing concurrency for a long time, it's very good at it.

The style of programming is very different in that you are encouraged to use processes in Elixir, rather than the callback style that is prevalent in Node. It feels weird at first, but pretty natural after a while.

I'm not sure there's much you can do in Node that you can't do in Elixir. But there are features in Elixir (again, because Erlang) like hot-code-reloading (update your app whilst it is running), and the way it can distribute tasks across nodes that I'm not sure are that straight-forward with Node.

Try CHANGELOG.md, it's pretty thorough.

There's http://ckan.org (disclaimer, I work with this) and http://dataverse.org if you're more academically minded. There are others, but hard to judge any claims of open-sourceness without access to source code.

It is great to see them releasing data, but I'm surprised they went with something based on Socrata given there are other OSS products out there. I can't imagine how much they paid - I guess that won't be in the data catalog anywhere :(

Most of my time I write Python, but I'm trying to spend more time with Elixir, and I haven't found using Erlang libs that hard.

There are a handful of rules to remember, if that, and it's reasonably straight-forward. module:func becomes :module.func, the erlang func probably wants char lists rather than strings, atoms are lower-case and should be changed to :atom, vars are upper case and should probably be lowered.

Learning the Elixir language is easy, thinking functionally less so (for me at least).

I'd suggest you find somewhere out of the house where you can go and work from time to time. I've been lazy of late (and regretting it) but I used to rent a desk at a local Hackspace where I could go and work for a day or two each week. It made a huge difference to my feelings of isolation, and also to my productivity on those days when I was at home. I also got to make new friends, which is always good.

The 'About Us' page says "As of today, the following companies have joined Advanced Erlang Initiative" under the "Founding Companies" header - which suggests more are able to join. Would be better if it were more explicit though I guess.

I'm really looking forward to seeing it grow, I've already found the videos very useful and the workshops look like a great idea. The more companies supporting Elixir and Erlang the better :)

That's great, until code.google.com no longer resolves, at which point it won't help :( Would be nice if they used that info to automatically redirect to the new site.

And it's own database which is mentioned in http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.systemd.devel/69...

"Don’t think about marketing and growth until you have a product you know customers love. Everything else comes after that"

This implies that the author thinks marketing is a uni-directional endeavour. Is it? I'd always thought it was a bi-directional thing, perhaps I am wrong.

Superfluous disclaimer: I know nothing about marketing.

There are already a few other data portals, and some of them (unlike Socrata) are Open Source.

CKAN - http://ckan.org

OpenDataCatalog - https://github.com/azavea/Open-Data-Catalog/

Junar - http://www.junar.com/

DKAN - http://nucivic.com/dkan/

PublishMyData - http://www.swirrl.com/publishmydata

CKAN in particular is used by a lot of National Governments ( http://ckan.org/instances/ ) , is Open Source, has a reasonably large developer community. It also isn't quite as expensive as some of the closed source commercial offerings.

There are a few more but in various stages of completion/usefulness.

Disclaimer: CKAN dev.

C is much simpler than Scala, is it more limited?

I asked on twitter, and got a reasonable response. Investing in learning Scala is a much longer term thing than learning Go (which is, in their experience, a much quicker thing to do).

You should read the first article in the series - https://gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk/2013/12/05/building-a-new-...

Sounds great. Would love to hear more. Is there a blog/project-page anywhere?

It's on the list - https://github.com/rossjones/alternative-internet#retroshare

Unfortunately http://tox.im says "Tox isn't ready yet, downloads will be available soon!"

Just in case you didn't see it before - github.com/rossjones/alternative-internet has a list of platforms,protocols and suchlike that are in this sort of area.

There are some interesting interviews with people working on re-decentralising the web at http://redecentralize.org/ - and there are more lined up for the coming weeks. Definitely worth a watch if you have the time.

Perhaps "Learning how to write a lisp-like language" is a requirement? Or perhaps it's low memory usage and fast start-up time for short-running tasks. Does it matter what he chooses for his own project?

I kinda like Clojure, but I don't think it would occur to me to default to it every time someone mentions the word 'lisp'. Not because it's not an adequate language, but there are downsides to using it for some jobs.

I've added it because the homepage has links to some interesting papers.

Yeah, I'm just waiting on Vinay to give me a full list of what's involved.

Because nobody sent a pull request? Have added it.

Okay. At least fourth person who's told me now. Will remove the non-major ones.

I'd like to keep them for completeness sake, but will try and make it more obvious that they should be avoided.

Because it was so obvious I missed it. I'll add it now.

PubSubHubbub is still alive and kicking though, and Google still seem to be encouraging people to use it.

The blogpost at http://googledevelopers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/pubsubhubbub-... also mentions a Feed API.

I'm confused, I guess this means that only the sync + ui for reader is dead.

In terms of third party code built in the same language, perhaps. Calling C is pretty straight-forward in Go (http://golang.org/doc/articles/c_go_cgo.html) and there are starting to be more and more 'native' libraries available (http://go-lang.cat-v.org/pure-go-libs for some, but by no means all).

So perhaps it is more of a sacrifice that is getting smaller day by day?