The Zen of Erlang (2016)
Does anyone know of erlang being used for scientfic computing? The ideas and "let it crash" scheme outlined in the article are really cool, and it made me think how it would actually be very useful for making robust data pipelines in scientific contexts. For example, in astronomy you would have a telescope spitting out raw data, and a pipeline processing the data to create more inspectable intermediate products. Typically these are brittle C/C++ programs, with lots of state and branching logic, and further they become extremely hard to refactor because their function is so integral to running the facility. Erlang seems like it would be very useful for a control and pipeline system like this that needs to stay alive and not crash, but it's hard to tell (for me) if it's well suited to numeric/scientific computing tasks. Do people know of libraries or resources that would be useful for that? I did find this neat lsci[1] package that aims to call python modules like numpy/matplotlib (which would be perfect) but is sadly in a nascent state.[1] https://github.com/lfex/lsci