learn erlang

I’m giving up on this; my new job will involve a lot of Javascript, so I suspect I’ll be spending all my term learning the subtle semantics of that language…

Yeah, I know—I keep rolling my eyes every time I hear someone talking about parallellizing code. “Oh, we’ve got all these processors available, so let’s start parallelizing our code to use them.” Yeah, that’ll be easy with that huge hunk of legacy code. APIs for parallel programming in C/C++ similarly seem comical because of the difficulty of writing code with correct locking and identifying the code that’s worth writing in parallel.

So last week, I see that a guy at work is cleaning out his office; he’s just quit to go work with a friend to start a company serving ads on the web. They’re writing the whole thing in Erlang so that the code can easily be distributed across multiple machines. He says it’s functional, distributed, message-passing, and has decent libraries for working with the rest of the world.

Hmm… functional language that a dot com is willing to use? This sounds interesting. Time to explore Erlang and see whether it might make using all those processors actually do some work for a change.