Erlang is considered the bete noire of programming languages with it's weird syntax and radical constructs. It's roots are in Prolog. Erlang is not pretty like Ruby but it has raw and brute power. It has a reputation of being very difficult to learn and even more difficult to master. But it is a language of many great virtues. In my opinion it is the only language which handles the concurrent programming problem properly. Erlang has all of the language constructs to build massive concurrent systems. This is the siren call or mantra as massive distributed systems start to become ever more important in application development. Erlang eschews threads for processes. Processes are the basic unit of concurrency in Erlang. Erlang processes are very lightweight and a computer with commodity hardware can easily host hundreds of thousands of Erlang processes. What makes this magic possible is BEAM, the Erlang virtual machine. Beam is the Bodgan Abtsract Erlang Machine. BEAM has been refined over some twenty years. Erlang is a functional programming language and message passing is the basic unit of inter-process communication in Erlang. The Erlang concurrent programming model implements the Actor design pattern. Erlang was developed from the git go to solve some very hard concurrent programming problems at the Swedish Telecom provider Eriksson; and the lineage shows in the language. Erlang is very pragmatic.
One of the strange aspects about Erlang is that it eschews the use of the assignment operator. In fact, Erlang does not have an assignment operator and the = operator is a pattern matching operator. In Chapter 2, the authors comment that once you get used to the pattern matching operator you will wonder how you ever lived without it. Now as every programmer knows the assignment operator = is so fundamental to programming languages as to be almost burned into our DNA. When I first studied the pattern matching operator = I found it to be weird, contrived and unnatural. But after a a few months of Erlang it seems to be the most natural primitive operator that subsumes assignment as well as the relational operators ( == and !=). And every language that lacks it seems to be missing an essential operator. Erlang will put your brain on a different wavelength,
I initially tried to master Erlang in 2008 by reading Joe Armstrong's book but gave up after seventy five pages. I was completely new to functional programming and got bogged down in language details which were not properly explained. I looked briefly at the Ceserini book. In 2010 I started reading Erlang and OTP In Action. This is a very good book and is very well written. Bear in mind that explaining Erlang properly is not the easiest thing in the world. The authors have a lot of experience in designing Erlang systems and the expertise shows through in this book. This book has a great virtue, it is designed to provide you with the knowledge to build a real world massively concurrent Erlang application quickly. The approach is very pragmatic. Chapter 2 of the book teaches you the Erlang language. Despite being a very lucid presentation, I had to read this chapter twice very carefully. Chapter 3 to 5 leads you though the construction of a concurrent Erlang application using OTP (the Open Telecom Platform). OTP is a general behavior framework for building massive, scalable, fault tolerant, distributed Erlang applications. It is a very nice and refined piece of work. By the time you finish these first five chapters you will know Erlang and the Erlang concurrent programming paradigm. This is a fast track to specialized knowledge. The rest of the book gets into more advanced aspects of OTP. If you want to build a massive concurrent Erlang system then you should be using OTP. In summary this book is very highly recommended and the authors have to be commended for taking the time and care to craft a great book on a difficult subject.
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Top reviews from other countries
F. Caprari
Libro fondamentale se volete conoscere OTP
Reviewed in Italy on December 4, 2018hammarbytp
A great addition to the Erlang library
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 30, 2012