Learning Erlang
It all started way back when I was doing concurrent programming in Java for the MMORPG when a buddy of mine pointed out CouchDB. It's a neat project, but was written in some strange language called Erlang. I started to look more into Erlang and found that the language was designed to addressed some of the more complicated aspects of concurrent programming. This appealed to me because those were my current pain points with the game. When do we lock around what data, which threads are changing what, do I need to use volatile for this variable too. It's a lot to think about, it's hard to get right, and Erlang solves those problems for you if you're willing to think differently.
I started by reading Programming Erlang by Joe Armstrong and now I'm reading through Erlang Programming by Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson. I'm enjoying the second book more than the first one, but this could be a side effect of being more comfortable with Erlang because I read the first book. I'm so taken with this bizarre language that I've decided to work through all of the exercises in Erlang Programming. I'll be posting my solutions and hopefully, by the time I get through all of them I'll feel comfortable enough with Erlang to build something with it.
Cheers,
- Halzy
