November 11, 2025
Type cd .. for feels
I Fell in Love with Erlang
Kid math panic to Swedish code romance—comments love the UI and revive 'Erlang Day'
TLDR: A programmer’s journey from early confusion to a love affair with Erlang charmed readers, while comments fixated on the site’s playful “cd ..” UI and revived Hacker News’s recurring “Erlang Day” nostalgia. The community praises Erlang’s keep-it-running reliability and enjoys the meta throwback, making old tech feel fresh again.
This heartfelt geek-to-romance story—childhood confusion over “X = X + 1,” a revelation via Prolog’s recursion, and finally a swoon for Swedish-born Erlang—had the crowd buzzing for two very different reasons. First, the interface stole the show: multiple readers cheered the retro command-line vibe, especially the cheeky “> cd ..” link. One fan even wondered if it hides an Easter egg, and suddenly half the thread felt like a scavenger hunt.
Then came the meta-drama: a veteran stepped in to declare it Erlang season again, linking to Hacker News’ classic “Erlang Day”. Cue the familiar split—some adoring the language’s reliability (think: phone-company tech that keeps systems from crashing), others rolling eyes at the cyclical hype while still admitting Erlang gets the big, tough web stuff right. Non-tech translation: Erlang is the quiet hero that keeps things running when life gets messy.
The strongest vibes? UI love vs. tradition talk. Jokes flew about “cd .. back to 2009,” and readers encouraged more posts, cheering the author’s journey from breaking Linux on repeat to finding truth in recursion. It’s a love story with a side of nostalgia and a dash of nerdy treasure-hunting.
Key Points
- •Early programming exposure on a Commodore 64 with BASIC caused confusion over assignment versus mathematical equality.
- •University study of C via the K&R book led to practical learning by repeated Linux formatting, compiling, and debugging.
- •A bridge partner’s question about summing 1 to 10 without loops prompted exploration of recursion.
- •Prolog provided a recursive summation example, shifting the author’s perspective to declarative programming.
- •The author learned about Erlang from a Swedish player, compiled it, and embraced its functional, distributed, and fault-tolerant characteristics from Ericsson.