Some notes on Erlang

I'm following this tutorial. Does anyone know of any that are better?

First note: There are no strings in Erlang. WHAT?? That's right. There are no strings. They can be processed, but since Erlang started as a language used in telecom, it is not the best language to process strings.

Joe Armstrong, the inventor of Erlang, gives a presentation here. It is looking like Erlang is used to build a program for concurrency and speed by parallelizing and utilizing more of the cores as hardware gets faster and faster.

I love this analogy: Joe Armstrong shares this analogy about programming languages. C is car that is easy to drive, but it breaks down occasionally. Java is like a family station wagon -- it's a little heavy. Erlang is like a fleet of little cars that work together to take you where you want to go.

How can you not love a powerful data retrieval tool like this? I'm liking the pattern matching.

 91> Weather = [{toronto, rain}, {montreal, storms}, {london, fog}, {paris, sun}, {boston, fog}, {vancouver, snow}]. 

[{toronto,rain},

 {montreal,storms},

 {london,fog},

 {paris,sun},

 {boston,fog},

 {vancouver,snow}]

92> 

92> FoggyPLace = [X || {X, fog} <- Weather]. 

[london,boston]

93> 

93> 

Check out my first program here!

Some Tools

More later.