Re:Switching to Elixir
by jacquesm on Friday November 10, 2023 @07:18AM
(#38217956)
The basic idea that infuses all of Armstrong's writings and work is reliability, not concurrency, that's just a means to an end to achieve higher reliability (and lower latency, which in the context of (soft) real time can be a failure condition if certain guarantees are not met.
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I think you are right and wrong. I've watched 3 or 4 videos of Joe Armstrong on YouTube this week (he seemed to show up a lot at Strange Loop). He talks a lot about concurrency for its own sake. However, you are right that he also heavily emphasizes reliability and how concurrency contributes to that.
More interesting to me is his physical theories about computation. For example, he hints often at his idea of the blackhole as the most powerful computer. As we think about the distribution of computational systems, I wonder how often we consider the density of computational systems.