7/12/2008

Erlang: Lovin’ It

OK, I couldn’t resist. I pulled the Erlang book off the shelf this week and dove in. I needed a distraction from work, then the whole idea of writing concurrent programs caught my fancy, and I saw the syntax that made me go hmmm…  now I’m hooked.

First impression of “Programming Erlang” – it’s not for beginning programmers. Which I really like, but I can imagine that if you don’t have programming experience, you’d struggle. Also, it helps alot to know another functional language (like Lisp) when Joe starts talking about list comprehensions and anonymous functions. I would rate the book at the "advanced” level.

All that said, I’m loving the book and loving learning the language. It’s entertaining and gives me the excuse to use Emacs, which I don’t use often enough these days. :-) I’m using Luke Gorrie’s excellent Distel mode for Emacs.

I’m going to try to refrain from giving you a blow-by-blow of my Erlang experience until I get to concurrent programming. Then, all bets are off.  :-)

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