techblog 

I’ve been spending some time learning Erlang recently. It’s a language which has interested me for some time now, so I’m happy to be getting the chance to evaluate it for a new project. I like the fact that it’s been designed for concurrent distributed systems, and shares a common ancestor with occam (a language I enjoyed coding in the past). These languages eliminate many of the problems of concurrent programs by having no shared state (although Erlang comes with mnesia, a distributed database). Instead, many otherwise completely independent processes communicate entirely by sending messages to each other (which accumulate in a process ‘inbox’). These processes may then be supervised by other processes on other machines, resulting in a highly concurrent fault-tolerant system. Sounds great!

On the down side, first forays into Erlang do reveal its long history. The origin in the 1980s is obvious, and the poor and sparse documentation and support is probably the result of a proprietary commercial system going open source. Symbian OS also suffered from poor documentation when it was first opened up to a wider community - this got much better with time, so hopefully Erlang will be easier to get to grips with in the future.

The debugging could certainly be easier - maybe I’ll work out the meaning of the arcane error reports one day…