Practical Erlang Mini-Interview

I’d like to thank Francesco Cesarini and Mike Loukides for taking a momen to answer a couple of questions about O’Reilly’s upcoming ‘Practical Erlang Programming’ book. I think getting answers straight from the horse's mouth is a lot better than the other rumours I’ve posted. Hopefully, I’ll be able to pin Francesco, Jan, and Mike down for some more questions as the book progresses.

---

You talk about this book being less broad, but deeper than Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World. What does this mean to you?

Francesco To me, it means the ability to ensure that everyone, regardless of background and previous knowledge of programming languages, is able to pick up the book and learn Erlang. Having taught Erlang to everyone, from corporate clients to university students, I know where they struggle and where the problems have been throughout the years. On one side, this resulted in our training materials evolving. On the other, it resulted in our teaching methods and hands on examples evolving. We are going into all of these details, explaining in depth areas we know readers will struggle with. We will be using many more examples, both from our training material and from our lectures, where we ask the delegates to use the shell as we explain the theory.

Why now? What makes you think the market is ready for another book on Erlang? What’s changed?

Francesco Erlang is expanding exponentially. Concurrency and SMP together with Joe’s book have pushed it to its next level. This has resulted in a critical mass which is helping us generate even more users. The market is ready not for one or two books, but for many books, as they generate traction and help each other. My hope is that this will result in an even greater critical mass.

Mike I tend to sign books on technologies that I want to learn about, or that I think I need to learn about. We tend to cover this up with lots of stuff that we call market analysis, but ultimately, that’s what it comes down to.

I was really surprised to see that the Haskell talks at OSCon were not just well attended, they had all the top spots. We didn’t have anything going on in Erlang, but my guess is that it would have shared the top of the list with Haskell. It’s not entirely clear what’s driving this. In the Ruby world, there are clearly a lot of concurrency issues that Erlang can help to solve. (One of the things that convinced me of the importance of Erlang was Lucas Carlson’s drproxy, which is a distributed reverse proxy server written in Erlang.

But I don’t think the Ruby community is really driving the interest in Erlang or in functional languages. There have been many other things happening: Microsoft’s F#, functional features in Sun’s Fortress, the Scala language, etc. What seems to be driving the interest is the idea that functional languages are going to make it easier to exploit parallelism, in a world where a low-end laptop has 8-16 cores. We’re not there now, but give it a few years and we will be. I certainly feel that programming paradigms are shifting, and they’re shifting in the direction of functional languages. Erlang is benefitting from that shift—particularly since Erlang was designed from the bottom up with concurrency in mind.

More Book Rumours

I spent about an hour on the phone with a publisher yesterday (not O'Reilly or the Prags) talking about their plans for functional and concurrent programming books. I've got to say that I came away pretty excited about what they have in mind. I won't name names or post a lot of details, but here are three cool things that stood out:

• They get the idea that there are two groups of people wanting to learn Erlang (Erlang programmers and programmers who want to learn more about Erlang's approach to concurrency) and they are targeting both camps.


• They're talking about more than one book — I'm not sure how many though


• Their first book is planned to be very hands-on, which I think is great.

Once they're a little bit closer to making announcements, maybe I'll have some more news to post. On a related note, I'm hoping to have some more information on O'Reilly's Practical Erlang soon too.

Not Just a Rumour

Just a quick update to yesterday’s post. I think we can confirm this rumour. As Mamut mentioned this presentation mentions the book. I’ve also heard back from Mike Loukides inside O’Reilly. I asked him if O’Reilly was really working on an Erlang book, and he told me:

It’s true. There’s not much that I can say right now—the Erlang book is still in the very early stages. So any predictions I can make about when it’s likely to be available are likely to be wrong. But they’re off to a good start, though.

Good news all around.

Books and Rumours of Books

Hot on the heels of the news that ‘Hardcore Erlang’ is no more I’m hearing rumours that O’Reilly is working on a ‘Practical Erlang’ book to go alongside their ‘Practical Haskell’ book. My informant has told me a couple of things:

1. the authors are also involved in teaching Erlang classes


2. there is going to be a website for the book soon


3. the book is going to be deeper (though less broad) than Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World

I’m hoping to get an interview with the authors as the book gets closer to publication. Until then, I’ll see what more information I can lay my hands on.

Feb 2008 Tidbits

Okay, here are a few quick bits about Erlang that I wanted to get up for people to see.

It looks like Erlang Training and Consulting Ltd is going to be busy with Erlang training in the US this year. They’ve scheduled seven courses spread over four US cities this year. If you’re in Los Angelas, New York City, Chicago, or Palo Alto (or close enough to make the trip), you might be in luck.

If those courses won’t work for you, you might also keep your eye out for the Pragmatic Programmers Erlang Sutdio. The only one scheduled so far is in Chicago, and is already full, but who knows where the next one will be—maybe you can talk the prags into bringing one to your home town.

Speaking of the prags, it looks like Joel won’t be doing the Hardcore Erlang book for them after all. As Kevin wrote over on his hypothetical labs blog, this is really too bad. I was looking forward to a follow up to Programming Erlang. The silver lining to this cloud is that Joel will be posting the content to his blog.

Reading SICP in Erlang and Ruby

I’ve had a long standing goal to read SICP, but it keeps conflicting with other goals, like mastering Ruby or learning Erlang (to name a couple of geeky ones). Recently I learned of a project to ‘translate’ SICP into Erlang (and other languages).

“Great! I can use this to help with both learning Erlang and reading SICP”, I thought and went to take a look at it. It turns out they also have a Ruby translation underway, so I went to look at that first. It turns out that the first couple of examples make me think that they either don’t understand Ruby or don’t understand SICP.

Page 5 of SICP shows that you can start up a LISP or scheme interpreter and type in an expression and it will return that expression, like this:

 > 486
 486
 >

The site recommends the following Ruby puts 486, which is not quite right:

irb(main):001:0> puts 486
486
=> nil
irb(main):002:0>

You see, this prints 486, but returns nil. A much better answer looks a lot more like scheme:

irb(main):002:0> 486
=> 486
irb(main):003:0>

With a problem like this early on, I’m not sure that I trust the Erlang or other translations. I do like the idea though, so I should probably stick with my idea of combining the goals, and just post my own translations into Erlang and Ruby (and let everyone else find my mistakes).

Long Time No Write

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here, and (sadly) a long time since I’ve taken any time to focus on Erlang. I’d like to rectify both of these deficencies, so here’s a first stab.

First off, I’d like to drum up another Provo Erlounge for October 9th at 7PM (MST). We can meet at the Open Source Technology Center again (we’re supposed to have wireless access at that point). There are a couple of routes we can go, either hitting the Concurrent Programming and Distributed Programming chapters from Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World or walking through some ‘real world’ Erlang code. Anyone have a request/suggestion for us?

Secondly (and more generally), I’ve recently been talking with a publisher about their entry into the Functional Programming world. They’re very interested in doing this, and seem to have a good plan. They haven’t settled on which language(s) they want to cover yet, but Erlang is on their list. They would like feedback on which languages, potential topics, and potential authors would be of interest. If you’d like to leave a comment here, I’d be happy to pass the information along. If you’re worried about other publishers mining the information (but, hey, that would just mean more potential books on Erlang and FP wouldn’t it?), feel free to email me directly.

And now, it’s off to spend a little time with Erlang.

May Contest Winners

After going through the contest entrants for May, we’ve come to a decision.
Joe, Dave, and I couldn’t decide between an entry on socket programming (which appears to be broken now) and one on ErlUnit.

The writers of these posts should drop me a line to get set up for their free copies of Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World.

If you’re interested in a copy, never fear. The Erlang Blogging contest is still running. Go ahead and write a blog post about Erlang, and add a link to it in the comments below. If you’re post is selected as our June Winner, you’ll win a copy of Joe’s book as soon as it’s in print. Great topics to write about include tools for Erlang programming, tutorials about Erlang modules or software, and tutorials about Erlang itself.

Thanks for the support in May, and good luck to everyone who enters in June.

Pragmatic Haskell

Wow! Pragmatic Haskell seems like it might be on the way too. I’d love to work with Haskel and Erlang side by side to get a better feel for Functional Programming, and a book by the Prags is probably the only way I’ll get into Haskell—the other books/tutorials I’ve seen just don’t work for the way my brain is wired (I’m guessing that I won’t need a cheat sheet to figure out how to write/read the code in this book).

Now, we just need to watch for an official announcement. I’m hoping it will be a beta book also.

May Blogging Contest

Updated! See below for a clarification.

Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World seems to be bringing a lot of attention to Erlang right now. In hopes of helping some of us newbies stick, I’ve worked out a deal with Dave Thomas, the Pragmatic Programmers are sponsoring a blogging contest over the next three months (May, June, and July). I can almost hear you asking yourselves, “What’s a blogging contest and what does this have to do with me?” Well here’s the deal:

I’d like to invite you to write a tutorial or explanatory post that supports or supplements ‘Programming Erlang’. At the end of each month, I’ll collect the entries and working with another judge (the prags and I are still working out who) will determine the winning entry. The author of the winning entry will receive a copy of Programming Erlang.

For the rest of May, ending at midnight on the 31st (MDT), I’ll be collecting entries in the comments section of this post. In June and July, I’ll put up new blog posts to collect links. I’m looking forward to reading a lot of great blog posts, good luck everyone!

Update:

You should be able to write any introductory to intermediate tutorial about erlang or tools around erlang for your entry. If you want to take a look at the Table of Contents for the book, you could always look here

Alternatively, you could buy the beta (pdf only) and look forward to getting a hard copy once you've written your prize winning entry.

Erlang and Haskell Books: First Impressions

I recently picked up a beta copy of Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World to go along with my (paper) copy of Programming in Haskell. I figured if I had both books, I could make quick runs through them as I try to decide between Haskell and Erlang as the FP language I'm going to focus on this summer. What follows isn't really a review of either book, just a few first impressions.

Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World looks like to be a very accessible book, that also goes into enough depth to be worthwhile. The version I got yesterday had 279 pages in the PDF, but an update was released today and my new copy hasn't found it's way here yet. I like what I've read of Joe Armstrong's writing and examples, and have caught on quickly to the initial concepts.

Programming in Haskell surprised me by being really small, only 171 pages (including the index). It on the scale of 'The C Programming Language', and so far it reminds me a lot of that book. I have to admit though, that I've always been put off by the seeming need of Haskell writers to use 'special Haskell characters' in their text, Programming Haskell even includes a table of 15 such symbols and how to represent them in ASCII. Bleargh!

So far, I'm leaning towards Erlang (mostly because of concurrency), but I'm not going to make up my mind for a while yet — too many other deadlines I need to deal with right now. As I get closer to the summer, I'll let you know which way I decide to go. (I'll also get real reviews of the two books up fairly soon.)