I’m taking my first foray into Erlang, and my first impression is, WOW. Why does it take me so long to get to the good stuff!

Given the ongoing demise/fragmentation of Java – and it’s popularity on the server – you have to wonder if a space is opening up for Erlang. Here is an incredibly stable, commercially supported, open source platform which is the state of the art – and proven – when it comes to multi-core/distributed server applications.

I’ve watched a few videos with Joe Armstrong, and the first thing that strikes me, is here’s a guy who thinks out of the box. Here’s a good one:

http://www.infoq.com/author/Joe-Armstrong,-Martin-Odersky,-Don-Syme

Most development takes place from the parameters placed on us by the mega corps, I find Joe’s views – like Rich Hickey’s –  quite inspiring in their disdain for the accepted norms. There are better and simpler ways of doing things.

Like Clojure, Erlang lacks typing checking, but there are some external tools for type checking that may alleviate my concerns. Further, I think single assignment pattern matching and immutable data help to offset the this loss.

The overall feel is a great balance of flexibility/power and given it’s long history a superb thoroughness and attention to detail.

Update1

Follow up to Tom’s question re Erlang/Node.js, this thread provides a good view of the Erlang opinion http://groups.google.com/group/erlang-programming/browse_thread/thread/142aed19df0decd9/4f7b1c085b57014e?lnk=gst&q=node#

Update 2

Erlang @ Facebook

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ekylq/facebook_and_erlang/

bd

Hacker News | Joyent’s Node SmartMachine Rollout This Morning – Announced on JSConf.

Google being sued because of connections with NSA; Facebook shutting down whistleblower Bradley Manning support group of 10000 (probably due to .gov pressure) does tend to support William Gibson’s assertion.

P2P surely is the future to rid ourselves of these organs of control.

I agree with the premise of this article and add (as always) that folks jumping ship from a static typing environment on large projects will not consider Javascript an excellent replacement. This is where haXe will shine.

Mozakai: Emscripten – An LLVM-to-JavaScript Compiler.

This is encouraging, my pstore project, which is a haXe/Node.js object store uses  Redis as a backend. No worries about scalability here!

I’m tweaking the haXe API generator now for 1.5.

The new claro theme does indeed look very pleasant

http://download.dojotoolkit.org/release-1.5.0/dojo-release-1.5.0/dijit/themes/themeTester.html?theme=claro