Hi all,
For those of you that aren't on the main SLUG list (like me), I'll be
giving a talk on the Erlang programming language at SLUG this Friday
(i.e. 28th of July).
For those who haven't heard of it, Erlang is a programming language
based on the functional programming paradigm that's targeted at
solving one major problem: concurrency. It has a number of very cool
features that makes it extremely compelling for writing large servers
that are required to be high-performing, have ridiculous availability
(99.999% uptime or better), can scale well to deal with huge load,
and can be distributed (even geographically). In addition, since it
has an industrial focus, it has quite a reasonable standard library
that a lot of other more academic languages lack (such as Ocaml and
Haskell), including things such as a full SSH implementation.
I'll also be covering issues about concurrency and why it's going to
be a massive problem for programmers in the next ten to twenty years,
and briefly cover some issues about the Jabber and XMPP instant
messaging protocols and how you can use Jabber chat clients and
servers as an application platform.
Erlang is quite a different beast from traditional application
development languages such as C/C++/Java, and also takes a different
approach to solving problems than the plethora of the dynamic
languages such as Python, Perl and Ruby. Even if you don't use
Erlang, you'll hopefully be able to take away a lot of good practices
from the talk and merge them into your own project (such as
preferring message passing for concurrency vs shared mutable state),
and gain a better understanding of systems-level debates such as why
userland thread scheduling is actually useful.
Anyway, come along! I'll even be showing some bits of the infamous
Erlang movie that's guaranteed to make even the geekiest of you
shrivel in horror...
--
% Andre Pang : trust.in.love.to.save <http://www.algorithm.com.au/>
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