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I picked up Erlang a couple of years ago because I needed to hack on a Jabber server. Never mind the functional aspect; Erlang stands out for concurrency, distr
by skeltoac 16y ago
I picked up Erlang a couple of years ago because I needed to hack on a Jabber server. Never mind the functional aspect; Erlang stands out for concurrency, distribution, and fault tolerance. Several of my Erlang projects have been running, at scale, trouble-free for months. I get a kick out of never getting service alerts.
Lisp is another good answer to your question. It's different. And the cliché is true: even if you never use it, your coding will improve if you understand Lisp. (Land of Lisp is a fine primer.)
However, with Erlang it has been much easier to find actual projects to do.
- nithinbekal 16y agoThanks for the recommendations. A lot of people are suggesting different functional programming languages here -- Erlang, Clojure, Haskell, Scala and Lisp. I'm becoming more and more interested in learning Lisp before trying the other languages. What do you think of such an approach? Would it help me understand Erlang/Haskell/Clojure/Scala better in the future?
- skeltoac 16y agoI am just now getting into Lisp so I can't say how learning it would affect subsequent language exploration. Functional programming is good but if it's the most interesting part of any language, that would be a boring language. Erlang's functional style and pattern matching syntax were novel but the immutable bindings, process spawning, and message passing made it interesting to me. In Lisp, I am interested in S-expressions and macros (and wishing it had those other Erlangly bits I mentioned!).