Erlang User Conference 2008 in Stockholm

Photos from the Erlang User Conference 2008 can be found here.

Update:
I forgot to mention that the article will tell you who became Erlang User of the Year 2008 :-)

ACM Queue Article

ACM Queue magazine features an article about Erlang:

Erlang for Concurrent Programming

It has been written by Jim Larson, Google. You might know him from Amazon's Simple DB.

CouchDB Screencast

Another interesting screencast from PeepCode this week, which I came to know because of their screencast and pdf on the Git distributed revision control system.


Otherwise they seem to focus on Ruby on Rails.


This time they teamed up with Jan Lehnardt of CouchDB, who wrote:

Hello everybody,

Geoffrey Grosenbach, famous for his PeepCode (http://peepcode.com/)
screencasts for developers, released a "CouchDB & Rails" screencast.
It is useful even if you don't do Rails but want to learn CouchDB. Go check
it out. It is only $9 and a free preview is available.

https://peepcode.com/products/couchdb-with-rails

Cheers
Jan
--
PS: If enough people buy this one, Geoffrey will work on more advanced
follow-up screencasts and I totally want that, so please do me a favour :)

So did I, because I want more Erlang stuff produced.

Announcement Erlang User Conference 2008

Here is the announcement of the 2008 Erlang User Conference in Älvsjö in Stockholm, Sweden.

The conference will be on Thursday, November 13th, 2008.

I was lucky to be there last year and was very impressed by both conference and beautiful Stockholm. You should be there too!

Erlang Programming

After Joe Armstrong's book "Programming Erlang" there will be "Erlang Programming" by Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson. Amazon.com lists it for December, 1st.

Erlang R12B-4

Erlang R12B-4 has been released. Go, get it at erlang.org.

Erlang in Practice - Screencasts with Kevin Smith

Pragmatic has renamed Kevin's screencast series to "Erlang in Practice".

So far there have been six episodes:

• Episode 1: Sending and Receiving Chat Messages ($5.00, 30 mins)
• Episode 2: Messaging Clients By Nickname ($5.00, 29 mins)
• Episode 3: Distributing Clients In A Multi-node Environment ($5.00, 31 mins)
• Episode 4: Storing Messages in the Mnesia Database ($5.00, 39 mins)
• Episode 5: Unit Testing with EUnit ($5.00, 29 mins)
• Episode 6: Adding REST Support with MochiWeb ($5.00, 46 mins)

I bought episode 5 and liked it, so I bought the rest as well.

The price is fair, especially if you live in the Euro zone, thanks to the weak dollar I paid around €3.20 per episode.

CouchDB News

Jan Lehnardt posted a bunch of news on CouchDB on his blog.

Erlang eXchange Videos

If you missed the recent Erlang eXchange conference in London or want to see the talks again, some of them are available on Google video. Just search for Erlang eXchange.

Video: Scalable Wikipedia with Erlang

From the recent Google Seattle Conference on Scalability 2008 there are now videos on YouTube.

Among them Thorsten Schütt's talk "Scalable Wikipedia with Erlang".

Lennart Öhmann Video on Erlang/OTP

While I am at the history of Erlang, here is a video of a talk from Lennart Öhmann last year at Google.

A History of Erlang

There is a really nice paper by Joe Armstrong: A History of Erlang. I was able to read it some time ago, but seem to have forgotten to post about it here.

Good that Ted Leung on the Air featured it again. Among the comments, there is a remark from Ulf Wiger about the history of SMP Erlang.

Steve and Joe on RPC

Joe Armstrong posted a summary of a recent discussion on the erlang-questions mailing list about the problems of the RPC (Remote Procedure Call) mechanism, where Steve Vinoski explained his opinions.

Joe added his opinion as well and explained the Erlang way of handling remote calls.

Steve then wrote about Joe's summary in this article.

Erlang by Example - Screencasts with Kevin Smith

Pragmatic offers a series of commercial videos, "Erlang by Example - Screencasts with Kevin Smith".

It is intended to help learning Erlang by going through an example project, a chat application.

So far there are three episodes of about 1/2 hour, priced at $5.

More Threads, More Trouble?

My Google Alert on Erlang spew out this article: More Threads, More Trouble?

It starts with the observation that we move from increasing CPU clock speed to an increasing number of cores and then continues with a brief overview of prominent approaches to add concurrency to software systems / concurrent computing:

• time-sharing
• multi-processing / multi-tasking
  
• multi-threading
• shared memory
• OpenMP / MPI
• futures
• message passing (with Occam and Erlang mentioned)
• Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP)
  
• transactional memory / software transactional memory (STM)

For me it was a chance to collect some Wikipedia links for further reading.

Facebook Chat

Found at Yariv's Blog: Facebook Chat is an article about the technology behind the Facebook social network.

They have a large web application with up to 70 Million users and want to provide them with presence information (like: "I am online", "I am busy", "I am away", "I am offline").

As the bidirectional information channel between the user's web browser and the Facebook servers they use BOSH, the XMPP way of binding XMPP via HTTP requests. The requests for BOSH are handled by a web server implemented in Erlang.

Erlang article in German iX Magazine

German computer magazine iX issue 06/2008 features an article about Erlang.
The title is "Neben- und miteinander - Parallele Anwendungen entwickeln mit Erlang/OTP" by Frank Müller. He writes about it here.

Chaos on Erlang

From upper left to lower right: logo Chaosradio, a diagram on discordianism, a spoofed Trans Europ Express train (TEE) and the Chaosknoten (chaos knot) which is a spoof of the old German cable network logo (it features a letter K for Kabel)

More Erlang coverage from Germany's Chaos Computer Club (CCC):

1. There was a recent one hour broadcast about Erlang on Chaosradio Express:
   

   CRE082: Erlang - Die Programmiersprache für Gleichzeitiges, Robustes und Verteiltes
   

   Presenter Tim Pritlove talks with Ben Fuhrmannek about Erlang. It was recorded at the Easterhegg in Cologne. (Found via the Chaosradio Blog)


2. One of the links for the CRE082 broadcast points to the Erlang lecture from the Easterhegg 2008 conference of the Cologne CCC branch:
   

   Wissenswertes über Erlang - sehr praktische Einführung in die moderne Programmiersprache



3. Another CR082 link points to an older video broadcast about Erlang:
   

   CTV068: Erlang - Declarative Real Time Programming Now!

   It turned out to be the famous 1990 Erlang movie ("Hello Mike? Hello Joe!") which was made in the tradition of Monty Python. If you want to know, what the actors think of their early work, go here. Too bad the director's name will never been known ("We actually used a professional company to do the filming, but I won’t mention their names as they would probably sue me for libel.")

The Mary Celeste of Programming Languages

Archetypal ghost ship Mary Celeste

Erlang: The Mary Celeste of programming ships, it appeared out of nowhere, nobody really knows what it does or what it’s good for, and nobody knows whats happening to it, or where it is going.

Intended as funny, but the grain of truth is there.

(Found at Application Generation, go check the comment on Haskell as well)

Another Erlang Book Project

Hypothetical Labs' Kevin Smith is working on an Erlang book for the Pragmatic Programmers (link). This project will focus on Erlang for web applications. David seems to like what he has seen so far (link).

April Fools' Day

This year's hoaxes on April 1st in the Erlang Blogosphere were quite good. First I came along

ErlyWeb renamed “Erlang on Rails”

where when viewing it I exclaimed something very profane until I realized I got hooked. :-)

Then came

CouchDB Language Change

which was worse because of the known sponsorship by Java loving IBM it sounded so believable. What a relief it was a prank.

Claes Wikström Podcast

Podcast with Claes Wikström about Yaws.

Another Joe Armstrong Podcast

Roberto digged up a Joe Armstrong podcast.
(Another one is here)

What Sucks About Erlang

Some Erlang criticism by Damien Katz of CouchDB fame.

Erlang on O'Reilly's radar

(Sourc: oreilly.com)

Some numbers on computer language books from an O'Reilly article.

It says

Minor Programming Languages -- 1,000 - 9,999 units in 2007

So the news in this category is that Groovy came out of nowhere and moved quickly up the charts. SAS, and MATlab had nice growth. Erlang, Processing and Nxt-G had no units in 2006 and each sold a nice quantity in 2007. Remember from above, this is the language grouping that grew the most in 2007. More than 14k units were produced by this grouping in 2007 versus 2006.

Well is 14k units really 14,000 books (or pdfs) sold? If we look at the table

*Minor*	U N I T S		T I T L E S		M A R K E T S H A R E
Language	2006 Units	2007 Units	2006 Titles	2007 Titles	06Mkt Share	07Mkt Share
basic	10,660	9,374	10	7	1%	1%
...
groovy	210	4,791	2	3	0%	0%
matlab	2,565	4,602	10	15	0%	0%
assembly	4,727	3,762	14	13	0%	0%
...
latex	2,827	2,718	4	6	0%	0%
erlang	538	624	1	2	0%	0%
awk	3,031	2,572	3	2	0%	0%
...
lua	1,563	2,367	4	3	0%	0%
...
processing	-	1,991	0	3	0%	0%
nxt-g	-	1,659	0	1	0%	0%
lisp	2,085	1,593	7	5	0%	0%
tcl	2,052	1,588	4	5	0%	0%
scheme	1,199	1,271	5	7	0%	0%
haskell	416	1,268	2	4	0%	0%
...

it means that Erlang's "nice quantity" is attached to 624 sold books. That's too low. Either the number is wrong or unit means a larger number of books sold.

What's all this fuss about Erlang?

A nice short description of Erlang and its benefits from Joe Armstrong.

AIR/Flex meet Erlang

Your Bear just noticed a post on Erlang by Ted Patrick. This is interesting because Ted works for Adobe as AIR/Flex evangelist.

Obviously Your Bear is not the only one who thinks AIR (one of the hottest technologies for creating GUI desktop applications), Flex (the JavaScript sibling used for many modern web applications) and Erlang on the server would make a great combination. You'll see the usual suspects in the comment section of that post.

See these posts on ErlAMF too.

LFE: Lisp Flavoured Erlang

Robert Virding, one of the main contributors to Erlang, has come up with LFE (Lisp Flavoured Erlang) which seems to be a Lisp interpreter for Erlang. Robert wrote:

I have finally released LFE, Lisp Flavoured Erlang, which is a lisp syntax
front-end to the Erlang compiler. Code produced with it is compatible with
"normal" Erlang code.

Read the announcement.

Erlang Blog Spotting

Blogs dedicated to Erlang show up like mushrooms after rainfall, so Your Bear decided to list them here:

Blog:
http://erlangblogspotting.blogspot.com

New book project: Practical Erlang

After the very friendly reception of Joe Armstrong's new Erlang book last year the climate for new Erlang books seemed good.

Alas the second book project which was announced, a project by Joel Reymont, was stopped.

Now the word got out on another book project, this time by Francesco Cesarini and Jan Henry Nyström of Erlang Training and Consulting, one of the few commercial players in the Erlang world. The project is called "Practical Erlang", the publisher is O'Reilly and involved too is Mike Loukides, editor of "Real World Haskell". Read more here.

Jan Henry's OTP course teaching was excellent, so Your Bear is looking forward to this book.

Ericsson Functional Programming Seminar

Ulf Wiger posted another great article on his blog, this time about a seminar on functional programming which was held at Ericsson on February 21st, 2008.

The list of speakers is indeed impressing:

• Simon Peyton-Jones, Microsoft Research
  
• Satnam Singh, Microsoft Research
  
• John Hughes, Chalmers
  
• John Launchbury, Galois

Ulf provides slides (pdf) and videos (flv) of the talks.

I have read some of the slides and it looks very interesting, e.g. Simon talking about
contracts and John Launchbury talking about the Galois company.

Lisa Awards: Best Comeback for a Programming Language

Funny.

More from the Science Department

Mark continued his journey into Erlang:

• Records in Erlang
• Simple Lempel-Zif Compression in Erlang
  

Still interesting to read how a physics/maths guy thinks about Erlang. Don't forget to read the comments as well.

Erlang Studio

Kevin participated in the Erlang Studio course and wrote about it in his blog:

• Before
• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3