From: Dave Thomas <dave@...>
Date: 2007-03-03T04:18:38+09:00
Subject: [ADV] Erlang book is in beta...

I love Ruby--I've done all my serious (and most of my not-so-serious)  
work in Ruby since 2000.

But that doesn't mean that I think it's the only solution--the  
universal language. There are always going to be areas where other  
tools excel.

One of those areas is concurrent programming. As the world moves to  
multi-core processors, and as we start to write applications  
distributed across intra- and internets, we need to find better ways  
to exploit all this extra power. If you've ever tried to write  
concurrent programs in Java, or even Ruby, you know the challenges.

Erlang is designed from the ground up to help programmers create  
highly concurrently (read thousands or processes), highly reliable  
(read 99.99999% uptime) applications. It's a real world language--it  
is used to write telephone switches, banking applications, trading  
systems...you name it.

I like it for that reason. I also like it because it's different-- 
very different. It makes me think about problems in a totally  
different way.

We were lucky to get Joe Armstrong, one of the inventors of Erlang,  
to write our latest beta book, Programming Erlang.

The book isn't being officially announced until next week, but I  
thought the Ruby community might appreciate an early look.

      http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/jaerlang/



Cheers


Dave