Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Five Reasons why you should learn Erlang

Here are the 5 resons why you should learn Erlang according to Joe Armstrong who is also the creator of Erlang

• You want to write programs that run faster when you run them on
a multicore computer.
• You want to write fault-tolerant applications that can be modified
without taking them out of service.
• You’ve heard about “functional programming” and you’re wondering
whether the techniques really work.
• You want to use a language that has been battle tested in real
large-scale industrial products that has great libraries and an
active user community.
• You don’t want to wear your fingers out by typing lots of lines of
code.

2 comments:

My blog said...

Ohh its seems that you are becoming an expert in Erlang.
I've some problem about the second point that you have given("fault-tolerant applications that can be modified
without taking them out of service").

My opinion is that anyway we have to stop the service for a moment while update the service.
I would like to know some logical explanation about this.

buffe said...

well, it's bit difficult to reply here how actually it can be achived. I assume that you have some knowladge in Erlang.

Suppose you are writing a server (may be using gen_server) and there is a call back module for it call server1. And you have a function in the code of the orginal server(the gen_server) call swap_code(Name, Mod) which is capable of defining what is the call back module. Then you write anothr call back module called server2 and compile it. And you call the swap_code function which set the call back module to server2. And now if you call a function in the server(the gen_server) it actually calls the functions in the server2 callback module. This is bit hard to explain here. If you go through the book Programmming Erlang by joe amstrong you can find a clear discription startion from page 292. To understand this you shold have good knowladge in Erlang.