Erlang

All the cool kids are doing it! Erlang seems to be all the rage at the moment. It's (almost) difficult to find a blog that isn't about trying or learning Erlang. The first time I heard about it I thought it was a joke, then I saw the video and was sort of convinced it was a joke but when I saw Joe's book in the book store last week I thought I'd give it a try.

The promise of Erlang is that it's a breeze to write highly parallel, distributed, fault-tolerant systems. Apparently an Erlang program run on a quad-core computer will run (close to) four times as fast without changes to source code.

I haven't finished the book or anything so I can't really say much about the language yet. It looks interesting but I'm not sure it will live up to the expectations. But it will at least give me a decent excuse to get a dual-core computer ;-)