Posted on: March 17th, 2009 by Famous Phil

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been unusually busy with schoolwork and comptuer repair work even though it was spring break.   Unfortunately, during all of spring break, I managed to get 20% of a single school project done, and the rest of my time was dedicated to mostly computer repair work.  I also didn’t really look at email or my personal site due to how busy I’ve been.

During the break, it was also my birthday.  For those of you who were wondering how it was, it was great, I got a little relax time in and did stuff that I wanted to do, and I didn’t look at a computer all day!

Now onto the main topic of what I’m writing about, Erlang.  Erlang was developed for concurrent processing and is used mainly for communication, mostly in phone switches.

As you may know, when you pick up a phone and place a call, you have a constant connection to the other end.  This connection could be broken if the software connecting you has to be restarted, recompiled, etc.  If your software is written in C, C++, Java and more, this situation is a real problem to consider.

The beauty of Erlang shines at full intensity here because you can recompile an entire module (program) and any existing connections will continue running on the old version until it is finished, then it will restart with the new version.  With erlang, code can be modified without affecting existing use.

As you may have guessed (or not), I have been programming in Erlang (20% of a school project).  Erlang is a very elegant language and very simple.  It does have its faults, however it is becoming more popular as time moves on because it supports multiple processors and processing clusters.  Although I only have 40 hours of Erlang experience, I would always recommend it for any application that has users that require that it cannot go down while they are using it.

You should try Erlang sometime, I’m sure you will also find that it is an elegant language.  Take a peek at their site: http://erlang.org

Tags: birthday, erlang
Posted in Programming
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