Keith Kim’s Blog

Erlang

Posted by Keith under Erlang

I’ve been looking at Erlang for some time now to see whether it gains popularity. At that time, I was looking for a new way for programming multi-threading/multi-processor (now multi-core). The existing methods were (and still are) little cumbersome and then I found Erlang after some searching. However the language is very different from other widely used languages, and I wasn’t sure if it worth the time to learn it…until recently.  I’m beginning to hear more people are talking about it, and I see more people blogging about it.  So I’ve played around with it a bit recently.

I installed Erlang on Sparc Solaris (v9), XP, Vista and Ubuntu. The installation for Windows was just a breeze. Ubuntu needed a couple of apt-get’s and the version doesn’t look like it’s the latest. On Solaris, it was a bit of hassle — the code itself compiles fine, but complained that I need ODBC. I never used ODBC on any Unix flavored OS except Windows — so I was a bit puzzled whether I could get such for my system. With a bit of googling, found that I needed to install libiodbc, and MySQL ODBC.

Erlang is getting a lot of attentions lately and I’m now reading tutorials and studying it — so far, it’s been fun experience.   It’s very similar to PROLOG.  So it’s not a completely strange language. I’ll keep putting some information on Erlang on my blog.  I get bored easily, and lately Erlang makes my days little more exciting.  Scala was at the top of my list (for interesting technology), but it’s Erlang (for now).

Btw, I’m toying around with followings these days: Python/Jython, Ruby/JRuby, Scala, PHP framework (Symfony), Android, Java3D, Statistical Learning….although I lost interested in Python and Ruby don’t play around with them much, but I’m still looking at them occasionally.

To Do with Erlang

• Test some web apps with ODBC — some claims Erlang beats Apache pretty badly.
• Find A.I. implementations in Erlang — NN, ML, NLP.
• Distributed file system.  Found some software.

Some useful links

• Erlang and ODBC, http://romenlaw.blogspot.com/2008/10/erlang-odbc.html
• MySQL and iODBC, http://www.flatmtn.com/article/setting-mysql-iodbc
• Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)

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