Diving into Erlang is a one-way ticket (@pavlobaron)

The almost zero-slide
story of my journey
into Erlang, and why
I’ll never be the same
again

Pavlo Baron, codecentric

Wednesday, February 20, 13

Pavlo Baron

@pavlobaron


it began in the 70s,
as I learned to tinker...


natural speaking wasn’t
really mine, so some
time later I discovered
the most expressive
language around

x86 assembly


At some point, I
realized that there is C
(guess it was about
growing up or
something).

So I started coding in C:
while (abc) {}

asm {
push bx
push es
mov bx, 9
mov ax, 0
...

But puberty was over
(I was like 18), and I
had to do some
higher level
programming. So I
discovered C++

The golden age of my
C++ coding: OO thinking,
abstractions, objects:
long SomeClass::getFoo()
{
_asm
{
mov eax,dword ptr[ecx]
}
}
...

But (enterprise) Java’s
advance was
unstoppable. I had
to jump in for
some money.

I loved coding Java - ﬁnally
patterns and real abstract
thinking:
package com.stuff.jni;
public class Magic
{
static {
System.loadLibrary("strlen");
}
public static native int strlen(String s);
}
...


Out of nowhere,
someone came along
and asked me to write
a tiny-footprint
database for these
weird Palm-PDAs.

And I found myself
coding for memory
maximum of 64kB
yet again.


But (enterprise) Java
was where the
money lived
(fun lived in
nightly hacks).

oh, look, an interest
calculator that’s perfect
for us! Let’s buy it for
our Java platform!!!


What, it’s
written in C???
What, it can’t do
parallel calculation?????


How parallelize this
thing in our enterprise
Java stack? Threads? EJB
doesn’t like threads.
Machines through
message-driven beans,
JMS, whatever?..

Now, the bullshit part
of the slides is over.
Here is where Erlang
kicks in.


I spent 3 months of my
life researching how
Erlang can help
parallelize this weird
piece of C code.


It could help.
It really could.

On one machine, on
several machines.


But their ops guys said
it’s not Java. So they won’t
take it (as if they knew
what real serious Java is).


And what happened? I
just used every chance to
play more with Erlang.
This is what happened.


I decided to write a book
only to learn this thing a
lot deeper. Took 2.5 years
of my life, worth every
single minute.


I toured through
Germany with an Erlang
live hacking session for
Java user groups. And yes,
they (mostly) liked it.


My Java code started
looking like this (and,
man, why didn’t it
compile?):

public void doit(String s) ->

...


I don’t even want to
touch a language not
having list
comprehensions and
lambdas. Tooth grinding
about those that don’t
have pattern matching

Erlang made my code better
in any language I use. I don’t
reassign variables. I work
with deep copies. I
sometimes use recursion
instead of loops. I cut code
into tiny, parallelizable
functions

I judge every platform by
the fact if I can spawn
2^27 actors on it and
pass asynchronous
messages between them

I am questioning every
home-brewed non-Erlang
distributed system or
programming framework
with a simple question:
why reinvent the wheel?

For speciﬁc use cases such
as messaging or distributed
data management, an Erlang-
based technology has
automatic credit of trust
when I look at it

I met some of the smartest
people I ever met who are
directly or indirectly related
to Erlang


No, Erlang is not perfect.


But to be honest, nothing is.

Erlang is just the only
considerable platform to
solve some speciﬁc
problems.

I have it in my toolbox. It’s
a precise machine, very
sensitive to doing things
wrong. But I’m glad I
learned to use it.

You should, too.


The End.

Thanks to the WWW
for helping out with
some code snippets. I lost
my own ones during
a house moving

Diving into Erlang is a one-way ticket (@pavlobaron)

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