Introduction about erlang given at the berlin geek2geek meetup

1. Erlang introduction
Paolo Negri @hungryblank

2. ME
• confounder at contentful.com
• experience in erlang from building game
servers
• interested in programming languages

3. “Traveling, whether in the
mental or the physical word
is a Joy”
Bertrand Russell
“The anlysis of mind”

4. Agenda
• Why erlang is a place worth visiting

5. How would you visualize
your code running?

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

7. Erlang

8. Erlang

9. Erlang

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

11. 2 Concepts
1) Process
2) Message

12. How it works?
A process sends and receives
messages to/from other
processes

13. Process
Erlang processes are light-weight
with small memory footprint,
fast to create and terminate,
scheduling overhead is low.
Erlang
documentation

14. Process is key to
• Concurrency
• Isolation
• Fault tolerance
• Control of state

15. Message
Messages between processes
are simply valid Erlang terms
They can be
lists, tuples, integers...

16. The language
The sequential subset of Erlang is a
functional language, with:
• strict evaluation
• single assignment
• dynamic typing

17. Single Assignment?
a.k.a immutability
“Once created by single
assignment, named values are not
variables but immutable objects.”
Wikipedia

18. Mutability
access only current state

19. Immutability
access all states

20. What for?
• Building reliable systems
• Building high concurrency systems
• Building SOA infrastructure

21. Where to start?
learn you
some
erlang
.com
learnyousomeerlang.com

22. Questions?