Re:A Beginners Guide to Erlang
by mononcqc on Friday May 31, 2013 @09:47AM
(#5798540)
The post does link to Learn You Some Erlang, but does so with what looks like an associate/affiliate link to amazon. I do prefer people to go to the home page, http://learnyousomeerlang.com/ which also contains the entire thing visible for free online.
Re:A Beginners Guide to Erlang
by SingAlong on Friday May 31, 2013 @10:16AM
(#5798718)
I'm currently reading "Programming Erlang" by Joe Amstrong and I'm loving it.
Buy the second edition beta ebook here - http://pragprog.com/book/jaerlang2/programming-erlang. The new edition highlights features that are in the yet-to-be-released versions of Erlang. Also has content on how to use tools like rebar.
Re:A Beginners Guide to Erlang
by kailuowang on Friday May 31, 2013 @10:44AM
(#5798900)
erlang is not a difficult language to learn IMO. What I, as a beginner to erlang from other languages, would like to see is a lot more solid libraries and sample code for strings rather than bytes.
Re:A Beginners Guide to Erlang
by andrewparker on Friday May 31, 2013 @12:16PM
(#5799477)
This is a great page, but it assumes that I (the reader) am already certain I want to invest time learning Erlang. I think it would be valuable if the author would open the page with a brief paragraph on why it's worth investing the time to learn Erlang and some of its tradeoffs vs other languages.
Re:A Beginners Guide to Erlang
by 501 on Friday May 31, 2013 @06:44PM
(#5801706)
Collating all the tradeoffs and bugbears would benefit both the existing community and newcomers. Things that bug me that immediately come to mind:
* No public bug tracker
* epmd's security (or lack thereof)
* Can't insist that epmd be started separately (`erl -no_epmd` won't start epmd but it also won't start epmd's gen_server)
* Can't swap out epmd because while `erl -epmd_module foo` is there, `net_kernel:epmd_module()` is barely used. (Although I don't think it's interface is documented anyway)
* No built-in way to hook UNIX signals
* While the documentation itself is pretty good, it's presentation is lacking and it's difficult to quickly correct mistakes as you run into them
* It can be difficult to reason about when a shared binary will be garbage collected
* OS packaging (I'm thinking of Debian/Ubuntu) of Erlang and Erlang apps tends to be more harmful than helpful (old packages, namespace conflicts, etc)
Buy the second edition beta ebook here - http://pragprog.com/book/jaerlang2/programming-erlang. The new edition highlights features that are in the yet-to-be-released versions of Erlang. Also has content on how to use tools like rebar.
There's also Chicago Boss, which is a cool web framework. If you are coming from Rails, you'll feel right at home. https://github.com/evanmiller/ChicagoBoss/
The IRC channels: #erlang, #chicagoboss #ninenines (for Cowboy, Ranch, etc) on Freenode.
* No public bug tracker
* epmd's security (or lack thereof)
* Can't insist that epmd be started separately (`erl -no_epmd` won't start epmd but it also won't start epmd's gen_server)
* Can't swap out epmd because while `erl -epmd_module foo` is there, `net_kernel:epmd_module()` is barely used. (Although I don't think it's interface is documented anyway)
* No built-in way to hook UNIX signals
* While the documentation itself is pretty good, it's presentation is lacking and it's difficult to quickly correct mistakes as you run into them
* It can be difficult to reason about when a shared binary will be garbage collected
* OS packaging (I'm thinking of Debian/Ubuntu) of Erlang and Erlang apps tends to be more harmful than helpful (old packages, namespace conflicts, etc)