A lot of people are asking me why I'm programming in Erlang these days. And yes, I'm talking about the ones who are in the tech world, not my mother and grandmother. Those two are wondering why I don't just use English.
I have read a lot of blog posts and articles recently that led me down this path. Reddit had been, and may still be, hot on Erlang posts. But the teaser article on Pragmatic Programmers for Joe Armstrong's book is the one that I think covers the most bases.
The same inquisitive people ask me if Erlang is used in any PROD apps. Well, does the mobile phone grid for England count? That's where a 2 million line Erlang program is achieving nine 9's reliability. For those of you scoring at home, that's 32ms of downtime per year. Pfft. hacks...
Making a program just about 32 times faster on a 32-core machine is quite appealing. Down in the trenches, though... If Erlang, Yaws (web server), and Mnesia (in-memory and on-disk distributed database) are used to write a Facebook app and the server doesn't melt under all the load, then that's pretty bad-ass. Just in case, I'll try to put the app in Amazon's EC2 so I can drop another Erlang node into place quickly. We'll see...
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