HN Gopher Feed (2017-09-06) - page 2 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
Stuff Goes Bad: Erlang in Anger (2016)
261 points by mutor
https://www.erlang-in-anger.com/___________________________________________________________________
ishtu - 11 hours ago
Related: http://spawnedshelter.com/
luketherrien - 9 hours ago
That is an awesome site. Does anyone know if there's a similar
resource for JavaScript that gives high and low level information
about the language?
FLGMwt - 8 hours ago
There's a "thanks" section at the bottom that linked to
http://superherojs.com/ which seems to be the same thing for JS
: )
weaksauce - 3 hours ago
you don't know javascript is fantastic at the more advanced
stuff.https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS
SomeStupidPoint - 10 hours ago
Erlang (even though I only use it via RabbitMQ) forever changed how
I think of reliable systems.Hardware has always been a story of
reliably operating unreliable parts. It was eye-opening to see the
same concepts applied to software.Fail fast, fail early!(Also,
Erlang did a really good job of lightweight threading, and how that
interlaces with things like a cluster of servers.)
whyever - 10 hours ago
> Hardware has always been a story of reliably operating
unreliable parts. It was eye-opening to see the same concepts
applied to software.Walter Bright has been advocating this for
some time:http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/safe-
systems-...
igouy - 6 hours ago
http://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdfSee 2.10
Related work.
kaycebasques - 5 hours ago
Erlanger
mac01021 - 9 hours ago
http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/do-use-something-in-an...(I
had never heard this idiom before)
twoquestions - 2 hours ago
I've heard it mostly in military contexts, like "That ship has
never fired her guns in anger", but otherwise not.
maxfurman - 8 hours ago
I don't use Erlang or Elixir but I love the idea of this book. Are
there any similar troubleshooting guides for other languages?
dmix - 8 hours ago
There is a book like this for Ruby (on Rails?) which I believe is
the inspiration for this Erlang book. I just can't seem to find
it at the moment.It was about improving old/legacy/poorly-built
code bases that are in a bad shape and need to be 'rescued'.
mononcqc - 8 hours ago
I have not read any Rails book ever and they could therefore
not be the inspiration for this one :)The true rationale behind
the book was to give a better tool to train new coworkers that
could help us operate the Erlang routing and logging stacks
back when I was still at Heroku, and at the same time to
provide similarly useful resources to other people maintaining
similar software in the broader community.Most of the
operational aspects of Erlang were a bit of black magic,
knowing where to dig through experience, having read the right
kind of docs, and everyone would carry little gists of
incantations and anonymous functions to run on production
servers to help figure out what may be going oddly on there by
correctly prodding at the VM.I wrote the 'recon' library along
with Erlang in Anger so that instead of just being black magic
& oral tradition, people would have a better set of well-
encoded practices to help approach the debugging and
optimization of running systems.
dmix - 7 hours ago
Fair enough, the landing page and description just seemed
similar to the one I remember for Ruby, that's all. Although
that was more about rescuing a project rather than overcoming
common barriers in a programming language.Sounds like a great
basis for an advanced programming book either way.
brudgers - 7 hours ago
There is a sense in which it is not possible to write a similar
book for other languages. Erlang's "Let it crash" design
philosophy is more or less unique among languages used as much as
more than Erlang. This means the definition of 'trouble' which
requires troubleshooting will tend to be different when trouble
is not an error in business logic. Likewise the details of
implementing solutions will be different, for example handling a
high frequency of crashes by making 10x the number of concurrent
actors available to the system.{A Love Song to Erlang} I think
Erlang is a beautiful piece of engineering design as engineering
design. I would not say that about any other language and find
other languages beautifully designed for other reasons. But
Erlang is an engineer's tool designed based on engineering
principles. The abstractions are engineering abstractions...but
with garbage collection.
okket - 11 hours ago
Previous discussions:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330501
(3 years ago, 54
comments)https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8979267 (3 years ago,
21 comments, dupe)
jlouis - 11 hours ago
Still a recommended book if you need to handle Erlang systems.
Either as a developer or as an operator.* Still good if you work
with Elixir* Good if you have, say, RabbitMQ or Riak in your stack*
Fred knows his stuff.
zzzcpan - 11 hours ago
Even if you don't need to handle Erlang systems, there is still
enough to learn if you need to build reliable systems.
sotojuan - 11 hours ago
Most great Erlang resources, like this and Designing for
Scalability, are very much recommended for Elixir programmers.
It'd be a shame for them to disregard some of the best OTP
resources just because they're in Erlang.
s_kilk - 11 hours ago
Just a quick +1 for "Designing for Scalability", as an avid
Elixir programmer. It's a great book on the Erlang/OTP
fundamentals which underlie Elixir and Phoenix.
polack - 8 hours ago
I'm going to go against the stream an say -1 on "Designing for
Scalability". Not that it isn't a good book, but the title
doesn't really reflect the contents. It's more of a beginners
book on Erlang/OTP than of scalability.
derefr - 3 hours ago
Do you have a recommendation for a more advanced book on that
particular topic?I'd also love to see something from the
other angle: taking a program that's already an instantiation
of a complex, distributed architecture, written in e.g. C,
and then rewriting it in idiomatic Erlang (or
Elixir?especially with GenStage/Flow stuff) to reduce its
code size while retaining the same distributed-system
properties as its ancestor system.
rdtsc - 6 hours ago
Agreed.Remsh and recon are tools I use almost every day.Chapter 3
planning for overload is useful in general not just for Erlang
systems, and is something that is not given enough consideration
usually.
mononcqc - 6 hours ago
I've since written a fairly complete blog post only on overload
management of asynchronous systems at https://ferd.ca/handling-
overload.html -- it hasn't made it in the book, though.
davidw - 5 hours ago
Wow, wonderful post that I hadn't read yet.In particular the
'fuse' type stuff is really important when you have a real
world system where "let it crash!" is not really ok, because
you have, say, a user interface, or a web server that should
not be part of everything just crashing. In particular,
something I've seen: if your Erlang application talks to a
database, and the database goes down for some reason, it may
be desirable to have the whole application not go down with
it!Thank you!