This blog post at Failbook has been making the rounds; the tl;dr is they use Erlang for their chat server.
(IMHO Failbook chat is fail, trying to use it makes me have to log in every 3rd message, but whatever.)
Anyway, they’re using Erlang (unintentionally lulzy promotional movie here). Erlang is what Ruby was a year ago: a bunch of people whose site you’ve never hard of are yammering about it in blogs and fora, that it’s the secret sauce behind their success, and going to take over the world, and how did they ever program before it, etc.
I must admit that I tried Ruby, and liked it, and seriously considered The Great Application Rewrite in it, and will probably start using it in place of Perl.
But Erlang … Erlang is just weird. I’m not one of those superhacker kids who can just sit down and write chat servers in every language I see. I’m good at what I’m good at, and that’s all I need right now.
My meandering point here, is the phrase “shared nothing” used in both the linked pros and cons articles/posts.
Hmmm. Shared nothing … I wonder where I’ve heard that before.
