Bulldozer00's Blog

After watching former C++ and CORBA guru Steve Vinoski rave about Erlang in this InfoQ video, I’ve been re-motivated to try and learn a dynamically typed (yikes!), functional programming language. After starting to learn CLisp with the “Land Of Lisp” serving as my training reference, I’ve switched gears. I’ve downloaded the Erlang distribution, I’ve downloaded the Erlang Eclipse plugin “Erlide“, and I’m using “Erlang Programming” as my first training book.

The book’s first chapter describes an impressive list of built in features that have drawn me to Erlang like a moth to a flame:

• Erlang was developed to solve the “time-to-market” requirements of distributed, fault-tolerant, massively concurrent, soft real-time systems.
• Erlang concurrency is fast and scalable. Its processes are lightweight in that the Erlang virtual machine does not create an OS thread for every created process.
• Erlang processes communicate with each other through message passing.
• Erlang has distribution incorporated into the language’s syntax and semantics, allowing systems to be built with location transparency in mind. The default distribution mode is based on TCP/IP, allowing a node (or Erlang runtime system) on a heterogeneous network to connect to any other node running on any operating system.
• Global variables don’t exist.

As of now, I’m planning to occasionally blog about my Erlang learning experience as I inch forward into the weird and whacky world of functional programming. But; since I’m doing this on my own time, I’m a slooow learner, I love working in C++, we don’t use Erlang where I work, and my intrinsic motivation may vanish, I may abandon the effort. If I do decide to “bag it“, be sure to call me a quitter.