Learning Erlang as an Experienced Developer

by jonalmeidaon 5/4/2018, 10:44:12 PM with 2 comments
  • by mikeurbachon 5/5/2018, 4:49:50 AM

      Sadly, I have even less to say about OTP given my limited knowledge of it. I would really like to have another course that would focus more on it.
    As an experienced programmer learning about the Erlang and Elixir ecosystem, I found Elixir in Action (https://www.manning.com/books/elixir-in-action) an excellent next step after working through the Elixir guides and writing some small applications. The examples are written in Elixir rather than Erlang, but really it is about how to structure OTP applications.

  • by rdtscon 5/5/2018, 5:27:24 PM

    I've had about the same experience getting started with Erlang. It was mostly using recursive, immutable state and the functional style that was hard to get my head wrapped around.

    Pattern matching was somewhat hard but you can of course program by not using them, then during code reviews, you start getting advice like "split into a separate function clause". So bit by bit I started to get patter of using patterns and guards.

    A thing that helped there was watching Garrett Smith's "Beautiful Erlang" video:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdJwECjylB4

    On concurrency I had already did enough programming with threads before that and didn't have much difficulty understanding processes, pids and messages. Well except for being happy to get isolated heaps, smaller size threads (a few KBs) and supervision trees.