Erlang and OpenFlow Together At Last 93
New submitter SIGSTOP writes "The LINC [OpenFlow 1.2 software-based] switch has now been released as commercial friendly open source through the FlowForwarding.org community website, encouraging users and vendors to use LINC and contribute to its development. The initial LINC implementation focuses on correctness and feature compliance. Through an abstraction layer, specialized network hardware drivers can be easily interfaced to LINC. It has been implemented in Erlang, the concurrent soft-real time programming language invented by Ericsson to develop their next generation networks."
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
I used Erlang once before, in a previous job. What a fucking nightmare.
It's certainly different from your average OO language, but it's no more "a fucking nightmare" than other functional languages like haskell and ocaml.
I don't like either because I believe garbage collection is a bad idea - the programmer should have full control, and it's the job of the language to expose flaws, not hide them.
I know I'm in the minority here, but still I look back to the days of (pre-turbo) pascal and (pre-95) Ada with fondness.
But really, Erlang is one of the better functional languages, as they go. It may be tough to learn, but it has enough software written in it to prove its wirth.
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Interesting)
Erlang's actor model is also just another tool in our toolbox.
Threads with shared memory, manual locking, mutexes, condition variables, restartable transactions and so on are hard to use. But that can also be okay. Sometimes the problem you're solving is so simple that it doesn't really matter, and sometimes it's so hard that there's no better way.
Having said that, of course, Erlang is closer to what Alan Kay meant when he coined the term "object oriented" than pretty much any other language has yet realised.