Oh, nifty

[cdybedahl]

The Pragmatic Programmers (you know, the people with the Ruby on Rails books) are publishing a book on Erlang. Written by Joe Armstrong, no less. If it's anywhere near as good as the Rails book, that's kind of awesome, because the one thing that Erlang is really missing is good documentation for people who don't already know it.

Comments

[sugoll.livejournal.com]

Speaking as someone who has to deal with the C Compiler sides of multi-core systems, tell me about this 'ere Erlang wotsit....

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

It's a functional language originally designed at Ericsson to program phone exchange systems back in the day when phones were expected to have damn near 100% availability. Things like concurrency, distribution, on-the-fly code replacement and fault tolerance were designed into the language and standard libs from the beginning.

Back at Telenordia we had a load-balancer kind of thingy in front of the mail servers that was written in Erlang, and that thing was by far the most reliable piece of software I've ever encountered. CPUs burned, bad updates got installed, OSs got changed, machine rooms rebuilt and the system just kept going. As long as at least one machine was running and had a net connection, the mail got through. I was particularly impressed that time they installed a broken patch and it still kept working. Kind of slow and without any actual load balancing, but it still did its job.

Also, I've found Erlang to be easier to learn than other functional langauges I've looked at. I've tried SML, OCaml and Haskell as well, but Erlang is the only one I've actually managed to write anything halfway useful in.