I am kind of between projects right now so I am wondering what I should do next. I really like functional programming, and in particular languages like Erlang, Haskell and F#. So I started to wonder if I should make an Erlang compiler for the .NET runtime.
I like Erlang for a number of reasons: It is simple, it is a functional programming language, the language is designed around the actor-model for interprocess (Erlang processes that is) communication, a system written in Erlang is very robust, and creating computing clusters and high-availability servers is almost too easy.
So if I am about to start making an implementation of Erlang for the .NET platform there are a few obstacles and questions that needs to be addressed first:
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I recently discovered this webcast called “Erlang – software for a concurrent world” by Joe Armstrong. It is recorded at a JAOO conference. Yes, I wrote “a”… I can’t find any info on which one it is but i strongly suspect it is from either London, Sydney or Brisbane in 2008.
Anyway, the webcast is about an hour long, and is really interesting.
Remember to check out Joe Armstrongs blog if you are interested in Erlang and functional programming.
I have been a software developer for more than 8 years now, and all this time I have been developing software in imperative languages like C++, Java and C#. During the years I have occasionally had a taste of functional programming in the language Haskell. The interest has never been big enough to do some real software development, but lately I have looked more into a couple of other functional programming languages, namely Erlang and F#.
What is functional programming
Functional programming is a different programming paradigm than what most programmers are used to. Programs written in imperative languages like C++, C# and Java are sequential programs, whereas programs written in a functional programming languages (FPL) is an expression, an is evaluated as such.
So in a FPL you write expressions, and in imperative languages you write methods. Code written in a FPL is more concise and easier to understand, and in short the benefits of using a FPL are listed here:
- More concise code, which means faster development time and fewer bugs.
- More comprehensible code, which again leads to fewer bugs and higher reliability.
- Immutable state, which leads to more reliable programs since writing multithreaded programs is easier without having to worry about shared state, locks and the problems that arise from this. (more…)
During the christmas holidays i had the opportunity to sit down and investigate the functional programming language Erlang, and i was not disappointed at all. I had heard some rumors about this particular language from various sources, particularly when i was at the JAOO conference in September 2007.
Now, there are a number of fundamental differences between a functional programming language and an imperative language like Java or C# that i like, all of which i will not delve into in this post (more on that later). But what really struck me with Erlang is the primitives for concurrent programming and building fault tolerant systems. Concurrent programming – and distributed ditto – has been build into the language from the very beginning due to the source of the language which makes it much more complete. (more…)