Erlang: The Movie
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN treats it as a classic that shows what Erlang was built for: robust, concurrent telecom systems with live upgrades.
What it is
A short film about the Erlang language, showing telecom systems built from lightweight processes and demonstrating hot code swapping. It is an edited version of the original Ericsson video.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2017 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec jimbokun · 2018-12 · on “Twenty Years of Open Source Erlang: A Retrospective from the trenches”
I had never watched Erlang the Movie before, this is truly a gem: [this video] This is a great way to explain the benefits of Erlang. Anyone who has tried to write robust, distributed systems should immediately see the benefits. Even all of these years later.
Recommends SkyMarshal · 2017-05 · on “Let's Encrypt OCSP and Issuance Outage Postmortem”
Their original video demo of hot code swapping is also a classic worth checking out: [this video] That got a lot of programmers interested in Erlang ~10yrs ago.
Cites jacquesm · 2019-10 · on “Show HN: Siproc – A primitive SIP client that spawns processes for each call”
Spawning a process for each call / endpoint is how almost every large phone switchboard does it. See also: Erlang The Movie: [this video]
Cites dmitriid · 2020-10 · on “A Brief Guide to OTP in Elixir”
This is the original video in its 90s glory: [this video] Regardless of where the call is handled, you can't just deploy a new switch in a telecom network, but you still want to upgrade them. This is where you really want hot code loading.
Cites probst · 2021-01 · on “Why is signal servers using Java and not Erlang”
Hehe, shame this got down voted so much. It's actually a pretty hilarious Erlang joke. They made a video way back showcasing Erlang in the setting it was primarily used: telecom systems. In this video they keep calling and greeting each other. The video can be found here: [this video]