Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good! A Beginner’s Guide

This online ebook wants itself to be a way to learn Erlang for people who have basic knowledge of programming in imperative languages (such as C/C++, Java, Python, Ruby, etc) and may or may not know functional programming (Haskell, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, OCaml…). Fred also wants to write this book in an honest manner, selling Erlang for what it is, acknowledging its weaknesses and strengths.

First of all, Erlang is a functional programming language. If you have ever worked with imperative languages, statements such as i++ may be normal to you; in functional programming they are not allowed. In fact, changing the value of any variable is strictly forbidden! Erlang has this very pragmatic approach with functional programming: obey its purest principles (referential transparency, avoiding mutable data, etc), but break away from them when real world problems pop up.

Now, we defined Erlang as a functional programming language, but there’s also a large emphasis on concurrency and high reliability. To be able to have dozens of tasks being performed at the same time, Erlang uses the actor model, and each actor is a separate process in the virtual machine. In a nutshell, if you were an actor in Erlang’s world, you would be a lonely person, sitting in a dark room with no window, waiting by your mailbox to get a message. Once you get a message, you react to it in a specific way: you pay the bills when receiving them, you respond to Birthday cards with a ‘Thank you’ letter and you ignore the letters you can’t understand.