The new Pragmatic Programmers book turned up today - Programming Erlang by Joe Armstrong.
The language looks like a perfect fit for an SMS platform (unfortunately we’re trying to fight the last war there, but that particular post-mortem is a story for another day), so after one guy at work picked it up he didn’t have much trouble convincing a couple more of us to check it out. At this point we’re just trying to figure out what it can do, but it’s interesting that it seems to be on a lot of people’s radar right now - I keep seeing Erlang references at Reddit and DZone. This is probably an effect of it being a Pragmatic book (they scored a major win with the Ruby books), but I find it hard to believe a functional language could ever grow the way Ruby did.
I ran through the first 20 pages or so tonight, so I’ve got some barely-informed opinions. First, the quality of the book is poor - the layout is amateurish and scrappy, as if it was typeset in Word. The content appears solid, but it looks like a PDF that’s been printed on a B+W laser and perfect bound. Second, the language uses makefiles. Makefiles! I get the impression the tool chain is going to be quite primitive. Third, it’s been a long, long time since I’ve done anything in a functional style (beyond a lingering abhorrence of side-effects, and the occasional array map/lambda function pair to confuse the “HTML programmers”).
We shall see, I guess.