More functional goodness

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 12:43:47 +0000

When I found out yesterday that the Prag's are publishing a book on Erlang I couldn't have ordered it fast enough. I've been through the Erlang tutorial a couple of times and found much both to like and to confuse me. Just reading the first couple of chapters of the beta book has helped me clarify some things and it holds out the promise of so much more.

I still love Ruby and will probably continue to write the bulk of my code in it (especially since I work in Ruby on Rails) but I have a few things in mind for which Ruby is not especially well suited and a compiled, multi-processing savvy, language might be a better fit. I'd already earmarked Erlang as a possible choice for implementing the backend of those projects (with a Rails front-end).

The other language I am considering is Haskell. I've been reading quite a few Haskell related blogs lately and am getting more and more intrigued with it. My concern is that I am spreading myself very thin right now and that Haskell (given it's legendary ability to baffle) may be a bridge too far. Still, since I am now actively experimenting with Scheme, Erlang and maybe Haskell I am hoping that I am on the cusp of some kind of functional epiphany.

Since I also love Ruby and Objective-C I'm not quite sure what that means. Probably that i'm in danger of blowing a lot of neurons.

Curiouser and Curiouser! on erlang

More functional goodness