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.

Successful Provo erlounge

Well, we got our Utah Valley Erlang group started with a bang—11 enthusiasts showed up (I hesitate to say hackers because most of us are newbies). We had a quick review of Erlang’s history and problem domain, and took a look at some code (the webput.erl example). A couple of folks also got Erlang installed on their laptops.

It wasn’t a bad start, but we’re not nearly done. We’ll be meeting from 7-9PM on the second Tuesday of every month going forward. The Open Source Technology Center has been kind enough to offer us meeting space—they even provided Pizza and soda this time around. For our June meeting, we’re each going to try our hand at writing some Erlang (something that will be run cooperatively over our laptops), then we’ll do a ‘show and tell’/code review. If I can just think of something interesting, but not too hard, it should be a lot of fun.

If you’re interested in joining us please do, we’d love the company. We plan on coordinating our meetings on the erlang-questions list unless we get to big/noisy/rowdy for it.

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.