Ok, so I had blogged and even somewhat complained about Erlang as an "every day" language. I'm here right now to say that I was dead wrong.
Erlang is simply amazing as I've gone from merely flipping through pages and references online and in books, to fiddling with gen_server off and on and to actually implementing a small facebook application based on Nick Gerakines'
erlang_facebook module.
What I found funny about that last bit (the facebook app) is that after seeing an implementation of it in Ruby, it was actually easier to comprehend just what all was going on in the ERLANG version. Yes, I said it, the Erlang was easier to read.
Getting back on track...
After digging deep into getting my head around Erlang, something kind of crept up on me as I went along. Particularly when it came to message passing and hot code swapping...
You ready? Put on your tinfoil hat. Below is my list of 5 examples The Matrix could exist and why it could be written in Erlang.
1. You ever wonder why we can only really "use" less than 10% of our brains? Ever wonder what that other 90-some percent is doing? That's right, passing messages to other "processes" and handling other distributed tasks.
2. When it comes to the hot code loading, this is a good example of how a "Smith" would work.
3. Every wonder why we can’t utilize 100% of our brains? Maybe it’s because the other 90-ish percent is too busy doing distributed tasks in conjunction with other processes.
4. Anything that scales just by adding cores (or nice, warm, fresh humans) and has been sitting somewhat idle in the wings for the last 20 years or so has GOT to be hiding something. I mean c'mon, most of the "love languages" (Ruby, Python, PHP) look at a multi-core system and don't really know what to do with themselves.
5. (And this will be the last one as I'm losing momentum) The system can self-sustain for obscene periods of time, if one had the "available systems" (people) one could die (literally and figuratively) and it really wouldn't matter, you'd have another waiting to take it's place AND you've got around 90% of it's processing power at your disposal.
This has been fun() (I can't help myself, I'm sorry) I hope some of you who come across this add some more to this list in the comments, I think there's a lot of cracks to be made.
