There’s no denying that writing scalable code is difficult. When the processors involved are multiplying by the day, some tactics become inevitable, such as using locks and setting up message queues between systems.
At the fringes of the scalability world, Erlang is being lauded as a programming-level solution to the problem. But even for its proponents, there’s no denying the language’s lack of penetration.
Originally created in 1987 by Ericsson, a Swedish telecommunications company, Erlang was designed to build fault-tolerant, concurrent applications. In some ways it is similar to Smalltalk in that everything is a message.
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1 Taking the road less traveled to parallel apps via Erlang and Haskell | insideHPC // Dec 30, 2008 at 8:27 am
[...] The first, on Erlang, points to an article in the SD Times on the use of the language in the enterprise (including places like Amazon and Yahoo!) Damien Katz won the Erlanger of the Year award for 2008. He’s the creator of CouchDB, a Lotus Notes-style document database written in Erlang. He said that he rewrote six months’ worth of C++ into Erlang over a month and a half. “It is actually very close to Smalltalk, I think, in terms of the original goals of Smalltalk. But Erlang hides its state within a process, and Smalltalk hides it in an object,” said Katz. [...]