Day 1: Appearing Human

Agent Smith is as a program that kills other programs, or simulated people, that disrupt the simulated reality known as the Matrix. The most basic trait that makes him dangerous is his ability to appear human. In this section, we’re going to look at Erlang’s ability to build general-purpose applications. I’m going to try my best to give you “normal.” It’s not going to be easy.

If you started this book as a pure object-oriented programmer, you may struggle a little bit, but don’t fight it. You’ve already seen code blocks in Ruby, actors in Io, pattern matching in Prolog, and distributed message passing in Scala. These are foundational principles in Erlang. This chapter will start with another important concept. Erlang ...

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