Andrew Peters’ Blog

Java.

Just kidding :-) Erlang of course because it’s the next Java (I’m still trying to decide whether this is a good thing :-) Seriously, Erlang is important because it combines both functional and concurrency-oriented programming models in a very powerful way. Specifically, it turns out that the Erlang approach is ideal for harnessing the power of multi-core CPUs.

Anyway, for anyone interested in Erlang here’s a list of resources that may be helpful in getting started.

• Download Erlang
• Get Programming Erlang
• ErlyWeb - the Erlang equivalent of Rails.
• Yaws - the Erlang web server.
• Building Yaws on Windows - How to do it.

Thanks to everyone who came to my session today. Here are the slides and demos.

Joel Pobar (the guy behind LCG among other things) put me on to this great paper which does a nice job of arguing why it shouldn’t be static vs. dynamic, but rather: “Static Typing Where Possible, Dynamic Typing When Needed.”

I also particularly liked this quote:

Using XML instead of byte streams as a wire-format is one step
forward, but three steps backwards. While XML allows dealing
with semi-structured data, which as we argue is what we should
strive for, this comes at an enormous expense. XML is a prime
example of retarded innovation; it makes the life of the low-
level plumbing infrastructure easier by putting the burden on
the actual users by letting them parse the data themselves by
having them write abstract syntax tree, introducing an alien
data model (Infoset) and an overly complicated and verbose
type system (XSD) neither of which blends in very well with
the paradigm that programmers use to write their actual code.

Worth a read.