I do mention Erlang near the start of the post, around the 360 word mark:

> Joe Armstrong’s talk The Do’s and Don’ts of Error Handling: Armstrong covers the key requirements for handling and recovering from errors in distributed systems, based on his PhD thesis from 2003 (PDF) [sidenote 3].

> [sidenote 3] By this point in time, Armstrong was about 52 years old, and had 10+ years of experience working on Erlang at Ericsson.

> Out of the above, Armstrong’s thesis is probably the most holistic, but it’s grounding in Erlang means that it also does not take into account one of the most widespread forms of static analysis we have today – type systems

Given how prevalent just reading the headline -> immediately posting a preconceived take is, most information is probably communicated through the top comments these days.

They aren't perfect tools but they are also not merely misguided academic exercised combined with vapid catch phrases, as the analysis seems to imply.

Thanks for the critical feedback.

You seem to put a lot of import on typing, any thoughts on the Elixir effort to introduce that to the language?

There was “Erlang Day” when the entire HN front page was about Erlang because pg had made some offhand request for more technical content:

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11

This was nearly 16 years ago apparently… (In my mind it’s in the “sometime before Covid happened” bucket. Sigh.)

Maybe it’s time for another Erlang Day this March 11?

And there it is

Erlangers generally dismiss criticisms about syntax as unimportant, but looking at the popularity of Elixir (which compiles to the same VM) suggests they're wrong about discounting syntax as important when it comes to adoption. Another new language that targets the BEAM VM is Gleam, which looks fantastic.

From reading Armstrong's stories about the origins of Erlang, it seems to me the Prolog syntax was an accident of history and a pragmatic engineering decision at the time, more than it was the deliberate choice of a careful language designer. That suggests that other options shouldn't be dismissed.

But I don't think either Java or Erlang were based on a PhD project?

(Edit: I just looked it up, and Joe Armstrong's PhD was 2003)

Java is also based on a doctorate research on fault tolerance?