learn erlang

Started working through ‘Programming Erlang’. Need to keep at it though ;)

I worked through the Programming Erlang book, and I have a good enough grasp on it.

As to grokking the language – not even close :-)

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.

I really need to start moving forward on this goal!

This gets priority over Haskell (still stuck halfway through YAHT).

Having a book written by one of the designers of Erlang makes it much easier to pick it up :-)

I’ve started learning Erlang. I have some experience using auto lisp so the this functional programming isn’t as foreign as I thought it would be.

someone had said that learning a language with doesn’t change the way you’re thinking means it useless.
I want to learn erlang as a way of thinking in parallel – maybe find a new MapReduce – a simpler, better way to look at things…

just started the tute for this more out of curiosity than anything else – was pleasantly surprised how prolog-like it was in syntax. Then i read its a descendant of prolog – makes me want to study it more seriously

It’s always interesting to learn new paradigms, and Erlang is assurely one of those for me. I learned to design programs through processes which communicate through message passing. Also, there’s a Scheme port of this style which is Termite (gambit)

It’s a nice language, but I can’t do serious work with it. I have to live in a Java/C++ world :-(