Between Erlang/Reia/LFE with Joe Armstrong - Erlang’s creator (or Building the Biggest Cloud ever!)
I love Erlang but for a couple of months I was wondering whether using LFE or Reia could speed up development (so other developers could jump in easily on an OpenSource project I am working on - read on for more about the project). Even though that Erlang is very powerful, it’s syntax is a deal-breaker for a lot of people. So, I thought that bringing developers from the world of lisp and Ruby/Python and showing them a similar (in syntax at least!) language could trick them make them give Erlang a shot. Boy, I was wrong…
Trying to write Erlang using the philosophy of other languages is like writing Lisp using a php mentality. Or better trying to eat spaggeti with a spoon. It just doesn’t feel right. You have to try Erlang, feel it’s core power and then try adding a layer on top of it. Writing software that communicates with it’s parts and expands easily, feels natural in Erlang. And a familiar syntax won’t save you from having to think in functional programming ways. Bottom line: Learn Erlang/Haskell and then try Reia/LFE to put some syntactic sugar. Sure that would bring many developers to the project…
But then, what’s the point of trying to move more languages to BEAM (Erlang’s VM)? I emailed Joe Armstrong (the creator of Erlang) about whether investing time and building your whole framework around a language wrapper is a sane thing to do. And here is his answer about LFE:
It depends on what you want to do - LFE is Roberts hobby project,Erlang has a entire Ericsson group supporting it. Erlang is battle tested in many industrial projects - If it’s a hobby project, then choose whichever you like if you want long-term support - go for Erlang.
And about Reia:
Same. Erlang OTP here to stay and supported by dozens of people and companies the others are hobby projects. (( I’m not being derogatory here - hobby projects are fine - but they have an uncertain future))
/Joe
That’s the result I came about, enhanced by the recent syntactic changes in Reia. These languages do a GREAT job in trying to bring more people to Erlang but I don’t think that you can use them without knowing Erlang (and I know that’s not their purpose but many feel that if you learn Reia there is no need to learn Erlang).
Of course, both Reia and LFE are very cool projects but I really wonder if they can survive the test of time and offer a nice alternative to Erlang (so they can pave the way for more languages in BEAM).
UPDATE: For those still reading:
How all this started?
We are planning (me and Jim ) to build the biggest cloud computing project man has ever seen and use it for scientific reasons (something like seti@home but BIGGER), that will fully utilize Erlang’s power and let it run on Clouds (Amazon / Mosso /…) and we are even thinking about trying to squeeze Erlang inside GPU and try a GPU cloud. It will be OpenSource, it’s called RainUp and we already made a small presentation at mediacamp2 here in Greece. We’ll upload more info in a couple of days and some demos. So, as you can understand, choosing the correct language is crucial for our project. If you are an Erlang hacker or Cloud expert or just wanna help, send an email at: contact[at]rainup.org.
Thanks for reading and I’d love to hear your opinions here or at twitter.
