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

CSI: Erlang T-Shirts

Some folks are selling CSI: Erlang T-Shirts via Amazon.


Alas, the Erlang here is the old name of the city Erlangen, which seems to be still used in Frankish dialect. The back features "GREIM SIEN INWESDIEGEYSCHN" which is the dialect rendition of "Crime Scene Investigation".

Amazon seems to use Erlang

Amazon seems to use Erlang for its SimpleDB web service. See here.

JAOO Interviews with Joe Armstrong

Two Joe Armstrong interviews from JOAA in September/October 2007.
Here and here.