Introducing Erlang

Mark Allen began with a url to download Erlang, so that everyone would be able to try out the language for themselves later in the evening.

While people were downloading and installing Erlang, Mark gave an overview of the language discussing positive and negative points of the language. The audience was quite engaged, asking questions ranging from tooling, ability to connect to libraries in other languages, and comparisons of Erlang's concurrency model with other languages.

After giving the group a taste of why you might be interested in Erlang, Mark posed a relatively simple programming challenge: FizzBuzz. He gave some basic syntax and concepts needed to solve the problem and told us how to work with the Erlang environment. Although most of the group found the syntax and approach challenging, almost no one wanted to give up and have Mark show us the solution.

Although not a Perl talk, this presentation was a really good stretch your mind exercise. Learning a language very different from the ones you already know is good for your programming ability. Erlang appears to be a good exercise for those who are more used to standard dynamic languages.

Mark has provided several resources that complement the talk:

• The slides for the talk
• The Introducing Erlang website
• The github repo for a second Erlang application

The presentation was recorded as a Google Hangout if you would like to see the whole presentation.

We had 15 people attending this month. As always, we'd like to thank cPanel, Inc. for providing the meeting space and food for the group.