Clojure versus Erlang

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

WhatsApp was recently bought by Facebook, for $19 billion. This is the first time a startup had a big success, using Erlang as the basis for all of its technology.

The most stable commercial computing device in history is a telephone switch developed at Ericson and built with Erlang. It can handle millions of simultaneous connections, it has 1.7 million lines of code, and it averages 1 hour of downtime every 20 years.

The one language I would like to learn, other than Clojure, is Erlang. These are the 2 languages that have the most radical ideas about concurrency, but their approaches are opposite. Erlang is 100% committed to an actor model, whereas Rich Hickey (inventor of Clojure) has repeatedly said he dislikes the actor model.

This short blog post gave a sense of what it would be like to handle state, in Clojure, as if it was Erlang:

http://noobtuts.com/clojure/handling-clojure-state-the-erlang-way

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://noobtuts.com/clojure/handling-clojure-state-the-erlang-way
Source