grantmichaels'blog

erlang

When evaluating framework/language combinations and/or pondering a possible platform change, stop.  Seriously, just stop right then and there, and visualize a cookbook or a recipe box. The more you compare and contrast individual pieces of the development chain, the less you get done. It seems it might as well be a law, and there are precious few feelings in the world humans like to exaggerate more unanimously than an apparent freedom of choice. Freedom of choice ranks up there with sex, mostly because people thoroughly enjoy mental masturbation on the whole, which is something they both provide abundantly – anyways, the relationship is clear.

So, why do I say you should visualize a cookbook, I’m sure this is what you are wondering after being directed towards sex and masturbation, right? Because cookbook examples and algorithms are your friend, and algorithms never beat out sex – whereas food – apparently does for many programmers! No, seriously though, find the combination where the kind of application you envision is trivialized by the design pattern, which lowers the cost of entry considerably, and provides an ego-boost in the place of a mind-fuck when you start to actually build.

All kidding aside though, when it comes time to decide which warm and fuzzy you are going to shack up with and thus get shackled to, evaluate the overall distribution of assets, find the one with a niche that fits your interest nicely, and then bury the pedal and ignore the roadsigns – which means turning off your microblogging client, closing the messaging app, logging off IRC, terminating your web-mail checker, retrieving your last few stumbles, and then finally turning on some familiar music and banging it out the quick and dirty way, preferably not by yourself, but through a pair programming session w/ a twenty-one year old, single female who’s into everything that you like or want to considering doing!

I’ve always preferred to spawn socket connections on a very regular basis, so I’m going with age and crossing the Atlantic and opting for Erlang. Erlang is really good about swapping too, and there is a heavy emphasis on using the preferred communication of the lightweight kind. What’s more, there is a share nothing attitude, which I just adore. Sharing is sucking, really, and with 13 years providing excellent services in the oral communications field for the Ericksson corporation, I’m guessing she’s got a lot of life experience in that regard.

I thought I could reduce a lot of desires to only needing Java, but it made me anxious and jittery. You know, I almost did chose Rails, but I can’t stand a coke whore at the end of the night. I thought about Django, but I’m not into dudes, even really talented ones. I thought about the dark side, but it was far too gooey. I threw an exception when my subconscious pre-loaded the notion of PHP, and then it made me itch. The thought of the Seaside is appealing to some extent though, I must confess, so maybe I’ll spend my twenty-percent time in that thing there over there.

- grantmichaels

PS – now that creative time is over, it’s time to resume tackling the mundane …