My Erlang Learning Status
Check out this slide from Erlang language co-designer Joe Armstrong’s InfoQ lecture: “Erlang – software for a concurrent world“. I’ve circled the features that have drawn me to Erlang because I’m currently developing product software where those qualities are hugely important to my customers. Despite their importance to success, they’re almost always given second class status by programmers and managers because they’re not domain-specific, “glamorous“, features.
The blue arrow is my sore spot. You see, I’ve been programming imperatively in FORTAN, then C, and then C++, since Jesus was born. Thus, learning the stateless, recursive, functional programming mindset that Erlang is founded upon is a huge hurdle for me to overcome. Nevertheless, as I’ve stated before, I’m half-assedly trying to learn OMOT how to program in Erlang with the aid of this very good book:
Here’s my learning “status” in terms of the book’s table of contents:
I don’t have an ironclad, micro-scheduled plan or BS risk register pinned on the wall in my war room, so I have no idea when I’ll be 100% done. But who knows, if I don’t abandon the effort:
I think you should consider Scala because you can be functional, OO, and generic all at the same time. Best of all worlds! Also the Actor semantics rock in Scala as well. Learning Erlang is a noble task for you to undertake, but I predict (what do I know…) Scala will see more commercial success than Erlang…2.1234567890 cents worth.
Thanx for the input Phil.