Erlang: The Pros

I had meant to post this much sooner, but there's been this thing called work. It gets in the way. Finally, here is the second half of my overview of Erlang. Concurrency Given it's background, it's no surprise that concurrency is easy and cheap in Erlang. Here's a contrived example:

12> PrintRandom = fun() ->              
        {A, B, C} = erlang:now(),           
        random:seed(A, B, C),
        io:format("~p~n", [random:uniform()])
        end.
#Fun

13> lists:foreach(fun(_) -> spawn(PrintRandom) end, lists:seq(1, 10)).
0.664105                                                             
0.664137
0.664170
0.664203
0.993887
0.993920
0.993953
0.993986
0.994019
0.994052
ok

First, the state for the random number generator is stored in each process, and it's initialized from a standard value. (Actually, maybe the random module should be on my Erlang: Cons list, although having the random module not produce random numbers probably makes debugging easier.) Line 13 spawns 10 processes, each of which prints a random number. Not very useful, but it should illustrate how easy it is to create processes. Also, you can easily spawn a lot processes. This code generates a random number and throws it away a million times in a million processes, and it executes in about 3.5 seconds on my machine:

-module(timespawn).

-export([make_random/0, spawn_random/1, ts/1]).

make_random() ->
    {A, B, C} = erlang:now(),
    random:seed(A, B, C),
    random:uniform().

spawn_random(0) ->
    ok;
spawn_random(X) ->
    spawn(fun make_random/0),
    spawn_random(X-1).

ts(X) ->
    timer:tc(?MODULE, spawn_random, [X]).

Distribution Another nice aspect Erlang is how easy it is to distribute processing. This is partially due to its open security model, which I listed as a negative. For example, in two separate console windows, I can start two different instances of Erlang. As long as I pass both the -sname argument (with different values) and the -setcookie argument (with the same value), they can talk to each other, even if they're on different computers in the same network. Functional I've worked with functional languages in the past, but I haven't really drunk the functional Kool Aid until now. I'm enjoying it this time, though, and want to start working more with one of the Lisps (probably Scheme), Haskell, or ML. When I do start on one (or more likely, on all) of these, I'm sure I'll talk about it here. OTP The OTP (Open Telecom Platform) is the standard Erlang library, and it contains modules that make writing fault tolerant, supervised, client-server, and distributed applications easy and fast. Conclusion I'm glad I've gotten to do a lot of Erlang recently. It's changed the way I think about concurrency and distribution, and it's raised my expectations of other systems that tackle the same problem. Even if I do most of my concurrent programming primarily in other languages, this will give me a good basis. And really, what more can I ask for from a programming language?