Educate. Liberate.

Erlang is getting a lot of press lately: from the new Pragmatic Programmers book to SlideAware guys and their “From Python to RoR to Erlang” series of blog posts, Erlang definitely appears to be picking up steam. I myself have just recently come around to its beauty, though it is not quite as enjoyable as ruby, but that is a subject for a different post.

Joe Armstrong’s new book on erlang is masterful; It is actually the first programming related book I have read cover to cover (well, in this case the entire pre-print pdf) since “AI for Game Developers”, and that was like 3 years ago. Something wasn’t clicking for me with when Erlang first piqued my interest around the start of the year. It has documentation, and it has tutorials, and the best I could find at the time was the “Getting Started with Erlang”. It does a good job of introducing the language, but I now realize why it failed at hooking me on Erlang: The OTP was only mentioned so far as to say that no info on it would be included in the tutorial. For those of you who don’t know, the OTP is a set of libraries and patterns (called behaviors) that work to enable all of the amazing capabilities of erlang such as cool-as-shit fault tolerance and seamless code upgrade with no downtime. When reading about the OTP in the new book I was hooked: The section that explains in plain detail the non-magic behind live code upgrade sent chills down my spine. I had one of those very desireable “a-ha!” moments when I found that by following this simply explained convention I could upgrade a server with no down time. That was what sold me on Erlang, and it’s a shame that those moments aren’t earlier in the pipeline.

Yet, I am having trouble exploring the Erlang landscape. There is so much to learn, and it seems like some of the interesting bits of Erlang are inaccessible to me. I think that it is mostly a presentation issue, and I would like to help out. Besides, this gives me a good excuse to really keep a blog going. As a challenge to myself, I am going to try and make one Erlang related post to this blog each week.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 at 8:25 am and is filed under erlang, programming.