CACM Article

Look Inside >> March 2009

The March issue of the Communications of the ACM journal features a new version of Jim Larson's article on Erlang: "Erlang for Concurrent Programming" (go here for the previous version)

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)