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Adopting Erlang

by ProfDreamer on 10/28/19, 6:37 PM with 68 comments

• by mononcqc on 10/28/19, 6:50 PM

  One of the authors here. This website is still a work in progress.

  It's an ongoing effort to gather all the resources that will help you use Erlang in a business. The booksite is divided in three sections focusing particularly on Erlang/OTP’s higher level concepts in the current open source ecosystem, how to use it in production (while setting up a pipeline for continuous development and delivery), and how to build a team when you’re starting from scratch.

  We're working mostly linearly in each section, but they're not all progressing at the same pace. We have nothing yet on "building a team" although our outlines are all planned; the "hard things to get right" chapter was supposed to come in later but we saw enough questions about these topics to rush it out.

  We might release things from each section as they are ready and we see fit. In the meanwhile, we're always appreciating feedback and people checking in to see what's new in terms of content.

• by dxhdr on 10/29/19, 12:16 AM

  This is amazing, thanks for all of your hard work! It's very encouraging to see continual effort put into the Erlang ecosystem. I haven't used Erlang in around 5 years so this looks right up my alley for getting up to date with the latest best practices.

  As an aside, it's been a little bittersweet seeing all of the attention and momentum going into Elixir. Yes it's great for BEAM and Erlang certainly benefits from those contributions as well. But there's just something so beautiful about Erlang, it deserves more attention than it gets. Thanks for keeping the dream alive!

• by shijie on 10/29/19, 2:08 AM

  As an Elixir dev for coming up on four (four! Jeez where has the time gone?) years, I’ve yet to really delve into Erlang. I can read the syntax well enough to figure out why my Hackney request is doing odd things with my HTTP headers etc..., but that’s about it. To all Erlangers out there, what advantages/niceties/powers do you have in Erlang that make you reach for the language over Elixir?

• by dynamite-ready on 10/28/19, 8:27 PM

  I've noticed there's a section in there about deploying with Docker. I know many other development communities swear by Docker, but a number of the OTP/BEAM devs I've spoken to seem unsure about it.

  I also tend to believe Docker makes little sense, where OTP releases are the alternative.

  What's the opinion here? This question only pertains to OTP development.

• by sb8244 on 10/29/19, 1:12 AM

  Great stuff, as always. I liked this quote:

  > If you expect failure to happen on an external service, do not make its presence a guarantee of your system. We’re dealing with the real world here, and failure of external dependencies is always an option.

• by btbuildem on 10/28/19, 10:03 PM

  I've always kludged my way through making Erlang applications. I still do, but having had a good read of this, I'm encouraged. Thanks!

• by rsrsrs86 on 10/29/19, 12:41 AM

  What is the use case for erlang given the current container technology and cloud providers? I mean many problems that erlang solved (and beautifully did it) can be dealt with docker and kubernetes