Re:Poll HN: Java vs Erlang, is Erlang worth learning?
by nostrademons on Thursday August 20, 2009 @09:58PM
(#776841)
You have two questions in your post:
1. Is Erlang worth learning?
2. Is Erlang worth integrating into my project?
The answer to #1 is most definitely yes. The answer to #2 may or may not be - I don't know enough about your business to make the call.
Oftentimes, the real reason to learn a new language is that it changes the way you think about programming in your existing languages. It may not be worth switching your company over to a new and untried language, but it's probably worth learning the techniques that gave rise to that new language. You can and probably should do Erlang-like programming in Java; it's just that it'll be syntactically more verbose and perhaps not as finely performance-tuned (though the performance gains of using HotSpot vs. BEAM will probably make up for that).
1. Is Erlang worth learning?
2. Is Erlang worth integrating into my project?
The answer to #1 is most definitely yes. The answer to #2 may or may not be - I don't know enough about your business to make the call.
Oftentimes, the real reason to learn a new language is that it changes the way you think about programming in your existing languages. It may not be worth switching your company over to a new and untried language, but it's probably worth learning the techniques that gave rise to that new language. You can and probably should do Erlang-like programming in Java; it's just that it'll be syntactically more verbose and perhaps not as finely performance-tuned (though the performance gains of using HotSpot vs. BEAM will probably make up for that).