Another good Joe Armstrong talk.
- systems that they originally designed purely for fault-tolerance did better on scalability benchmarks than systems designed for scalability. Led to the observation that they are related and instead of a tradeoff (“you can have either scalability or fault-tolerance”), instead you have “you can have both or neither”
- according to Alan Kay, messaging was really the key idea of OOP, as it truly decouples objects (original idea in Smalltalk/Squeak, but lost in XEROX PARC work)
- error handling must be external because the machine the error happened on might be dead. Design fundamentally is to not have to program differently for everything running on one machine vs multiple machines.
- Erlang terms are designed to be serialized/deserialized without parsing (just very low level marshalling). Part of the reason that databases like Riak can be so fast.
distributed systems
erlang