Why did you decide "against" using Erlang?

 

Have you actually "tried" (means programmed in, not just read an article on it) Erlang and decided against it for a project? If so, why? Also, if you have opted to go back to your old language, or to use another functional language like F#, Haskell, Clojure, Scala, or something else then this counts too, and state why.

I returned to Haskell for my personal projects from Erlang for the simple virtue of Haskell's amazing type system. Erlang gives you a ton of tools to handle when things go wrong. Haskell gives you tools to keep you from going wrong in the first place.

When working in a language with a strong type system you are effectively proving free theorems about your code every time you compile.

You also get a bunch of overloading sugar from Haskell's typeclass machinery, but that is largely secondary to me -- even if it does allow me to express a number of abstractions that would be terribly verbose or non-idiomatic and unusable in Erlang (eg Haskell's category-extras).

I love Erlang, I love its channels and its effortless scalability. I turn to it when these are the things I need. Haskell isn't a panacea. I give up a better operational understanding of space consumption. I give up the magical one pass garbage collector. I give up OTP patterns and all that effortless scalability.

But its hard for me to give up the security blanket that, as is commonly said, in Haskell, if it typechecks, it is probably correct.

We use Haskell, OCaml and (now) F# so for us it has nothing to do with lack of C-like syntax. Rather we skip Erlang because:

  • It's dynamically typed (we're fans of Haskell's type system)
  • Doesn't provide a 'real' string type (I understand why, but it's annoying that this hasn't been corrected at the language level yet)
  • Tends to have poor (incomplete or unmaintained) database drivers
  • It isn't batteries included and doesn't appear to have a community working on correcting this. If it does, it isn't highly visible. Haskell at least has Hackage, and I'd guess that's what has us choosing that language over any other. In Windows environments F# is about to have the ultimate advantage here.

    • There are probably other reasons I can't think of right now, but these are the major points.

    The best reason to avoid Erlang is when you cannot commit to the functional way of programming.

    I read an anti-Erlang blog rant a few weeks ago, and one of the author's criticisms of Erlang is that he couldn't figure out how to make a function return a different value each time he called it with the same arguments. What he really hadn't figured out is that Erlang is that way on purpose. That's how Erlang manages to run so well on multiple processors without explicit locking. Purely functional programming is side-effect-free programming. You can arm-twist Erlang into working like our ranting blogger wanted, adding side effects, but in doing so you throw away the value Erlang offers.

    Pure functional programming is not the only right way to program. Not everything needs to be mathematically rigorous. If you determine your application would be best written in a language that misuses the term "function", better cross Erlang off your list.

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