If you’ve talked computers with me you know of my extreme fondness for Ruby, so you should be surprised to know that I’m trying to learn Erlang! I want to use Ruby as my full-time programming language but my job requires that I program in C# or C/AL; I don’t see any Ruby (sans Rails) opportunities in the near future, plus, I can’t find a good programming book on Ruby locally, so I decided to give Ruby a break and just have fun with a new language.

While I’ve done some Lisp programming in school but I’ve always felt that I was missing out by not knowing any functional languages. I considered F# briefly but it didn’t excite me at all, beyond the functional paradigm F# doesn’t add anything new, it doesn’t make it easier to solve another class of problems.

Why Erlang?  Erlang lets me solve problems differently. It has concurrency built into its DNA—it’s ideal for building fault-tolerant systems, it also supports hot swappable code and it’s functional programming language.

I wish I had it 6 years ago.  The old system I worked on was a built on C/C++; if you’ve done worked with pthreads you know how painful it can be to debug a multi-threaded program. Creating a performant and fault-tolerant system is immensely challenging and I was constantly fighting the language, not to mention that I had to come in to work at 5:30 AM to update the system with the latest code. If I could go back in time I would build the server layer in Erlang.

I’ve spent 3 weeks trying to learn Erlang and it has been really fun, functional programming is completely new to me and I feel extremely uncomfortable doing it, but when I look at what I’ve done and realize that it only took half the lines it would normally take to solve the problem I can’t help but laugh.