Joe Armstrong on Concurrency Oriented Programming
I just finished watching the excellent discussion on concurrency oriented programming by Joe Amrstrong on InfoQ. I have had both the itch to explore functional programming and the Erlang book by Mr. Armstrong for many months now, however, it wasn’t until moments ago that I realized that my experience with Erlang could not be fairly approximated by my failed introduction to F# and ASP.NET. To be fair, F# seemed to be both powerful and competent. I could not, however, allow myself to return to the confines of programming in the Microsoft community having just experienced enlightenment in the form of the open source community and all that is collectively known as Web 2.0. Having made my reentry into programming with Ruby on Rails, I could not enjoy ASP.NET as a framework, although I can say surely that I would have cheerily chosen F# as my programming language. Having watched the aforementioned presentation though, I must investigate further the mathematics of multi-core processing and take Joe Amstrong’s account into deeper consideration. As the vice president of manufacturing for a CAD/CAM fabrication house, I’m very accustomed to solving bottlenecks in production by staffing appropriately, redistributing resources, and generally solving problems in a manner most consistent with the conceptual model that Mr. Armstrong has recently presented at the JAOO event. While I’ve become quite excited about finally getting to become familiar with some of the newer dynamic languages as of late, I won’t be able to disregard the practical sensibility of concurrency oriented programming without dabbling in Erlang for at least a number of months firsthand. The pursuit of being able to focus on a single grand-unified programming language for web development has fallen short time – and time again – for me these past months, so I’m neither surprised or the least bit upset that Erlang has reappeared in my code-space.
grantmichaels
