Seven Languages in Seven Weeks

Wrapping Up Erlang

At the beginning of this chapter, I said that Erlang made hard things easy and easy things hard. The Prolog-style syntax is alien to those familiar with the broad family of C-style languages, and the functional programming paradigm has its own set of challenges.

But Erlang has some core capabilities that will be tremendously important as new hardware designs make programming for concurrency more important. Some of the capabilities are philosophical. The lightweight processes run counter to Java’s thread and process models. The “Let it crash” philosophy simplifies code tremendously but also requires base support at the virtual machine level that just doesn’t exist in other systems. Let’s break down the core advantages and ...