Last year I saw Kevin Smith do a presentation at the local raleigh.rb group on this fascinating little language called Erlang. Erlang is a functional language that is dynamically typed. Its true power is that it makes concurrency, one of the most difficult programming problems, extremely easy. One statement that really says it all to me is this:
In Erlang spawning a new process is as easy and cheap as creating an object in an object oriented language.
The presentation peaked my interest and I dabbled with Erlang when I had time last year. I went to a couple of the local Erlang hack nights, I started reading the Programming Erlang book, and I checked out the prag prog screencasts (also by Kevin Smith).
Last week I went to a great 2-day training class on Erlang put on by Kevin down in Carborro at the co-working facility there. This class impressed me for a couple of reasons:
1) I feel like I finally understand Erlang and I can actually start a project using it.
2) I normally hate training classes, but this one was actually very effective. It put the focus on writing erlang code in labs, but the labs were just a problem and you had to figure out how to solve it. They weren’t the classic step by step labs that are just mindless instruction following, you really had to stretch your knowledge of the language and what you had learned to complete these labs. I enjoyed it so much that I am actually considering trying to put together a training course and becoming a trainer is one of the things I never wanted to do.
With all this knowledge I have started an interesting little project with Erlang. I am attempting to re-write the reporting section of Adzerk (the software that runs Ruby Row and The Lounge) using Erlang. I have been meaning to separate the reporting piece from the rest of the application (especially from a database perspective) for sometime and this gives me a great excuse. Erlang will make it easy for me to make my reporting system near time, advertisers and publishers will be able to see impressions and clicks seconds after they happen instead of the day after like how it currently works. (I know you could accomplish this in just about any technology, but Erlang makes it easier to do this and to scale in the ways I want to).
So if you are looking for a new language to pick up this year I would encourage you to try out Erlang. I plan on using it more and more and will be posting interesting tools or tricks I find to this blog.
-James
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