Erlang: An Overview

Recently I've been programming in Erlang. It's a new computer language for me, and I thought I would talk about it. This will take several posts. Today I'll just provide an overview of the language and environment. Erlang was developed by Ericsson telecommunications for developing soft real-time concurrent systems. I've never developed real-time systems before, soft or hard, so I won't talk about that much. I haven't done a lot with concurrency, either, except a touch of threading here and there. Nevertheless, the concurrency and distributed features of this language are what really attracted me to it. Originally, Ericsson implemented Erlang in PROLOG, and this still shows in some parts of Erlang, such as the way it uses pattern-matching. As an undergraduate, I went through a period where I programmed more or less only in PROLOG for about two years, so a lot of this feels like a stroll down memory lane. Other parts are very new. It's primarily a functional language. It has a lot of features designed for doing telecom programming, such as processing binary data. Erlang code is organized into modules, which are compiled and run from a read-eval-print-loop (REPL). A short "hello world" style module would look like this:

-module(hello). -exports([hello/1]). hello(Name) -> io:format("Hello, ~p.~n", [Name]).

The -module line identifies the module, which is also the name of the file containing the module. The -exports line identifies the functions from this module that are exposed to the outside world. The hello function is the rest of the module. io:format is the standard way to print to the console. Next, I want to look at some of the parts of Erlang that I'm less fond of.