04.23.07
Erlang - Good fun (groan)
So, the other day I was shopping around for a new language. Specifically, I was looking for a functional language that wouldn’t cause my brain to bleed (and not Scheme. Love it dearly, but I needed something new). Enter Erlang. I found out about this little guy from a new beta book from the prag guys called Programming Erlang, Software for a Concurrent World (totally recommend it).
Bullets:
- Functional
No state == Hooray!
- Supports Hot Swapping of code
I know I wouldn’t even think of swapping any other way than hot
- Designed to support distributed, fault-tolerant, soft-real-time, non-stop applications
I actually know what that means! To be fair, I swiped that bullet off the wikipedia page
- Super Sweet Thread Communication Mechanism(tm)
Threads are actually an extremely common part of Erlang development. In most languages, threads hurt kittens. In Erlang, they only hurt nasty dogs who probably deserved it.
I’d recommend checking out the prag book linked above and see for your self. In a bit I’m going to post about ErUnit, the xUnit testing framework I wrote for Erlang. In the mean time, here’s my initial stab at a TextMate Erlang bundle.