Learn You Some Erlang For Great Good!

When you start working with a new programming language, on the surface it seems that all you are doing is learning a new language. But at a deeper level, you are doing something much more profound—you are learning a new way of thinking. It’s this new way of thinking that is exciting, not the minor details of the punctuation or how the language looks compared to your favorite programming language.

just keep in mind that randomly throwing parallelism at a problem is not enough to make it go fast.

Erlang forces you to write actors (processes) that will share no information with other bits of code unless they pass messages to each other. Every communication is explicit, traceable, and safe.

if you were an actor in Erlang’s world, you would be a lonely person, sitting in a dark room with no window, waiting by your mailbox to get a message. Once you got a message, you would react to it in a specific way: You pay the bills, you respond to birthday cards with a “thank you” letter, and you ignore the letters you can’t understand.

Soon you’ll be writing distributed programs. This is when the fun starts. . .