Tutorial On Building Robust Servers In Erlang

mvw writes "Wanna go beyond Java, Perl, or Python? Joe Armstrong has published a nice tutorial on implementing robust servers in the functional concurrent Erlang language. Here is the link."

Why Erlang?

[StressedEd]

Does anyone have a (one line) compelling reason why Erlang is preferable to (say Perl, Java or even good ol' C(*))?

Cynically I look at this and think "great, another programming language that allows me to print "hello world" in a more obtuse manner".

I'm quite happy to be put straight on this, from any hardend Erlang users.

(*) Ok, ignoring the point of buffer overflows, etc.

Re:Why Erlang?

[whee]

Hmmm.. I like the idea behind the "supervision tree". Why is that not possible to implement in other languages?

It may or may not be possible to implement, but chances are something like it isn't distributed with the language. The supervisor structure distributed with Erlang is well-tested, robust, and quite usable.

Is that similar to the implementation of concurrency in Ada?

I'm not familiar with concurrency in Ada. In Erlang, processes are extremely lightweight and communicate via message passing. The processes themselves are done in the runtime, so there are no limits imposed by the OS (besides system resources, of course). With a shared heap, even the memory requirements are extremely low (compared to Java or C, for instance).