The frustrating part of #Erlang is that the language is so well designed that I always want to go back to it even though the ecosystem is a huge PITA. I should probably start to extend what I already wrote on the build part to handle more complex systems with dependencies.
@galdor
Erlang fan here. Where could I read more about a takeover by banks? I thought Elixir was used across industries e.g. Toyota was using it. @djrmarques
I finally finished my article on how to build #Erlang applications from scratch. If OTP applications and Erlang releases are still opaque to you, this should help.
#CommonLisp type declarations are a life saver, but they are fundamentally limited: you cannot use them to express that a list contains elements of a specific types. Frustrating given how ubiquitous lists are. #Erlang type specifications are much more flexible.
The CONS type specifier cannot be used to enforce the type of the elements in a list.
For example, the (CONS INTEGER) type specification (which is a shortcut for (CONS INTEGER T) will match any cons cell whose car is an integer and whose cdr is anything. So (CONS INTEGER) will match '(1 2 3), but it will also match '(1 "2" 3.14).
You know, I like #erlang, but one has to seriously consider wtf is going on when +0 being equal to 0 is considered a bug and then, they double down on it and write code to enforce it.
I'm sure there's some logical reason, but still w.t.f. a) positive and negative zero are nonsensical ideas b) no reasonable person wants 0 to not equal 0.
After 4 years on the board of the #erlef foundation volunteering to help various things in both the #erlang and #elixir communities (and 1 year before then in the IEUG to bootstrap the EEF), I'm finally stepping down and leaving my position to @Amos -- Long live the Amos King!
(I'll still be around the foundation's build & packaging working group and reviewing stuff for #otel for the observability group—no I'm not fully out of the picture)
tfw you find a script that you wrote a few years ago, and you want to write it up as a blog post, and you can't figure out how you wrote it in the first place.
This post brought to you by the Erlang compiler's +to_pp option, which seems to be undocumented, and I don't remember where I found out about it.
Right, #Erlang people, where can I read about generating parsers for binary formats?
I've got something BNF-like; I'm thinking I could (at compile time) turn that into an Erlang module that uses a bunch of binary pattern-matches to parse it efficiently.
The recording is now available of my talk “How Little Languages Shape the Future” from Orlando Code Camp (#OrlandoCC) on Saturday. A little bit of ranting about language popularity, a little #Elixir, a little #Erlang, and a lot of feeling good to be back speaking after a long pause.