A Case for Erlang

I've spent the last couple weeks teaching myself Erlang. The Programming Erlang book that comes out in two weeks is pretty good, and the folks in #erlang have also been helpful. The syntax is generally simple and memorable enough that you won't forget how it works if you take a week off from hacking. All in all it is pretty easy to learn.

I haven't written a huge volume of code yet, although that is partly because the language is so powerful that a lot of programs are only two or three lines long. For example, there is a function that iterates through a list one element at a time, applies a function to that element, and then outputs a new list as a result. This means that 95% of the text processing I've done has just been using this one line code snippet. (This works because strings are treated internally as lists, so you iterate through the string one char at a time.)

I'm not a hacker so I don't have a lot to compare it to, but so far so good.

If anyone tells you Erlang isn't proven and isn't "ready for prime time," punch them in the face. Hard.