Learning about Erlang

Here’s a quick post before getting back to my homework…

A little known programming language has been getting more attention lately thanks to my favorite programming book publishers, the Pragmatic Programmers, announcing an upcoming book on the subject. It’s called Erlang, and was created by the Ericsson corporation about a decade ago for use in telecommunications devices.

I’ve looked at Erlang a little bit, mainly out of curiosity. Ruby, my weapon of choice these days, is completely object oriented while Erlang is a functional language, a concept I’m still trying to wrap my head around. From my understanding though, it sounds like I’d better brush up on my math if I want to play around with it.

Erlang has a few interesting things going for it. It’s incredibly robust and fault-tolerant, offering hot-swappable code and the ability to process data concurrently. Since it was designed for critical services such as telecommunications and financial trading, programs written in Erlang sport an absolutely amazing “seven 9’s” of reliability. That equals downtime of just 3 seconds per year. That’s impressive.

If you’re interested in learning more (no worries if you’re not), click play on the video below. I thought it was a spoof video at first due to the production value, but there’s some good content there if you can get passed the mustaches.