erlang introduction geek2geek berlin

Erlang introductionPaolo Negri @hungryblank

ME

• confounder at contentful.com

• experience in erlang from building game servers

• interested in programming languages

“Traveling, whether in the mental or the physical word

is a Joy”Bertrand Russell

“The anlysis of mind”

Agenda

• Why erlang is a place worth visiting

How would you visualize your code running?

Maybe

http://www.flickr.com/photos/target_man_2000/8628913523

Erlang

Erlang

Erlang

Erlang

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mitosettembremusica/2874216489/

2 Concepts

1) Process

2) Message

How it works?

A process sends and receives

messages to/from other

processes

Process

Erlang processes are light-weightwith small memory footprint,fast to create and terminate, scheduling overhead is low.

Erlang documentation

Process is key to

• Concurrency

• Isolation

• Fault tolerance

• Control of state

Message

Messages between processes are simply valid Erlang terms

They can belists, tuples, integers...

The language

The sequential subset of Erlang is a

functional language, with:

• strict evaluation

• single assignment

• dynamic typing

Single Assignment?a.k.a immutability

“Once created by single assignment, named values are not variables but immutable objects.”

Wikipedia

Mutabilityaccess only current state

Immutabilityaccess all states

What for?

• Building reliable systems

• Building high concurrency systems

• Building SOA infrastructure

Where to start?

learn yousomeerlang.com

learnyousomeerlang.com

Questions?