Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing
There is a very common pattern in the world where people conflate <i>goals</i> with <i>results</i>. Of course, when I say that, it&#x27;s obvious that the two things aren&#x27;t the same, but the unexamined assumption that they are the same sneaks in anyhow when you aren&#x27;t looking, a cognitive shortcut hard to catch yourself making and harder yet to get in front of and deal with.<p>In the light of this statement, the answer to what I think is the thesis question of that entire piece:<p>&quot;This begs the question: why aren&#x27;t language and library designers stealing the structure behind Erlang&#x27;s behaviours, rather than copying the ideas of lightweight processes and message passing?&quot;<p>Is that while Erlang has a lot of good <i>goals</i>, the <i>results</i> of how they got there are simply not the state of the art. Or, to put it another way, language designers are not copying Erlang, and they are <i>correct</i> to not copy Erlang.<p>I respect Erlang a lot. They were a good 10-15 years ahead of their time. However, you will note that if you add 10-15 years to the creation date of Erlang, you still end up in the past. If Erlang were to come out today, fresh, nobody had seen it before, into an otherwise identical programming language environment, I would say it makes several mistakes.<p>One I&#x27;ve written about before is that Erlang is a non-Algol language for no reason: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7277957" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7277957</a> (Note the library mentioned in that post, suture, is now mature, and I use it all the time. It works for what I need.) But in the context of this post, that&#x27;s less critical.<p>The other major mistake I&#x27;d say it made if it came out in 2023 is that it is a totalizing environment. By that I mean that it has this built in implicit assumption that it is responsible for all the reliability in the system, and you don&#x27;t get Erlang&#x27;s features very conveniently if you don&#x27;t use it as the complete control backplane for your entire system. You run an Erlang cluster, and it bundles all the message passing, restarting, reliability, cluster management, software deploy, and everything into one system.<p>But for the world we live in today, that&#x27;s a price not worth paying. We don&#x27;t need the Erlang message bus to be the only message bus. The Erlang message bus is, frankly, not very good, and it&#x27;s actively terrible if you want to use it for one non-Erlang process to communicate to another. We don&#x27;t need the Erlang message bus. We have a dozen message busses, some in the cloud, some commercial, some open source, some that double as retention (Kafka), all of which scale better, none of which tie you to Erlang&#x27;s funky data types.<p>And then, within the matrix of those message busses, we don&#x27;t need Erlang&#x27;s restart capability. We have an abundance of ways to restart processes, from systemd, to kubernetes, to any number of other ways.<p>We don&#x27;t need Erlang clusters for redundancy any more. You just run multiple copies of a service against the message bus, on multiple systems for redundancy.<p>We don&#x27;t need Erlang&#x27;s behaviors. We have interfaces, traits, object orientation, and even just pushing that entire problem up to the OS process level, or writing a cloud function, and any number of ways of achieving the same goal.<p>Erlang&#x27;s software deploy is interesting, but we have a lot of options for it. The whole attempt to do live updates is interesting, but it also imposed a lot of constraints that systems that don&#x27;t have that need, which is the vast majority of them, don&#x27;t need or want. This is perhaps the space where the state of the art isn&#x27;t that far ahead of Erlang. It&#x27;s still a mess, despite all the churn in this space. But even so, with all the options available, you can probably find something better for your system than the Erlang way of upgrading software, even if it isn&#x27;t necessarily much easier.<p>The cognitive hazard that Erlang presents the community in 2023 is that it has some very good writing on the topic of reliability and its other goals, and then, naturally, one segues into the discussion of how Erlang solved the problem. And it was a very interesting solution for the time. I used Erlang for many, many years back when it was effectively the only solution to these problems.<p>But it isn&#x27;t the only solution anymore. The space has exploded with options. Unsurprisingly, the ones that a highly innovative pioneer tried out first are not the best, or the only. They chose well. Let me again emphasize my respect for the project. But it&#x27;s not on the cutting edge anymore.<p>Granted, the diversity of options does mean the real world has gotten quite chaotic, where you may have three message busses attaching systems implemented in a dozen different languages, but that&#x27;s something you can take up with Conway&#x27;s Law. Erlang couldn&#x27;t work with Conway&#x27;s Law without totally converting your entire company to it, which just isn&#x27;t going to happen.<p>The reason why language designers aren&#x27;t rushing to copy Erlang is that what was excellent and amazing in 2000 (and, again let me underline, I mean that <i>very seriously</i>, it was a cutting edge platform built with a lot of vision and moxie) is, in 2023, mediocre. Erlang is a mediocre language (Elixir is at least &quot;good&quot;, Erlang is mediocre), attached to a mediocre message bus, with a type system that doesn&#x27;t even reach mediocre, with a mediocre totalizing approach to system design where there&#x27;s a very significant impedence mismatch between it and the rest of the world, with an at-par-at-best VM (I won&#x27;t call that mediocre, but where it used to be head-and-shoulders above everything else in certain ways, it is now merely competitive), with mediocre standard libraries, and a mediocre product fit to its own stated goals. It just isn&#x27;t the best any more.<p>The state of the art right now is super chaotic. I can hardly get two systems deployed on the same infrastructure any more, because there&#x27;s always some reason <i>something</i> in that list has changed. But when the chaos settles and best practices emerge, something that I&#x27;d say is at <i>least</i> a good 5 years away, the result will clearly have Erlang inspiration in it for sure... but it won&#x27;t look a lot like Erlang on the surface.<p>What is worth copying has largely been copied. It doesn&#x27;t look exactly like Erlang, but this turns out to be a <i>good thing</i>.