I did the same thing a couple months ago. Picked up the pragmatic programmers’ book on Erlang as I took a couple weeks off at the end of the year. You really have to start thinking differently, more in math terms unlike procedural or OO design.

The syntax is a bitch. Up til now I was going the other way – Java to Ruby/Groovy where the syntax was less restrictive, more elegant. With Erlang, I could never remember whether a line needed a comma or a period.

I think what’s less important than the “half the lines of code” is the fact that in some sense you have a guarantee that your code is thread safe.

Definitely a lot of fun.

Catch you later.

James: It took me forever! I’m thinking it’s because I’m a total noob and I’m not used to recursive solutions. So far the code’s been pretty readable, Erlang’s a small language but I’m sure the syntax will get insane soon.

Before deciding on Erlang I looked at a couple of other functional programming languages and one thing that really turned me off was the syntax