23 Jan 2008

Why Erlang Matters in 2008

I found this article yesterday, courtesy of planeterlang.org :

SD Times – Erlang: What the Cool Kids Are Doing

He defines "Geepster" as a Geek Hipster, and says that as Ruby is now truly breaking into the mainstream, "Geepsters" are now moving on to Erlang. The surge in interest is due to Joe Armstrong's new book, plus "the growing realization that we are, indeed, entering that “concurrent world.”".

I guess that makes me a Geepster. :-) But I don't think his explanation does a Geepster justice.

Why would people be getting more aware of a "concurrent world" right now?. And why would this realization point towards Erlang? Erlang has been around since the 1980s. Why bother learning it in 2008, as opposed to 1999 (dot-com boom) or 5 years from now?

Macro forces – Changes in the marketplace:

Amazon EC2 – Every new internet startup wants to use EC2. It's an inexpensive, outsourced datacenter – but ONLY if your application can scale dynamically.
Intel Core 2 Duo – SMP in your laptop. Now developers can see the benefits of SMP-capable applications first-hand, even during the prototype stage.
Hadoop and Google's MapReduce – buzz is building about these parallel-computing systems for tackling massive datasets using commodity hardware. But these are ONLY useful for batch processing.
Ruby on Rails scaling woes – buzz started with an interview with a Twitter developer full of great quotes

Maybe more people are starting to think "SMP/parallel computing matters", especially for web applications. People are wondering in the design phase how to utilize multiple "cores" effectively. Erlang has answers to these questions.

Micro forces – Changes in Erlang itself:

Open-sourced in 1998 – disqualified it from last dot-com boom, save for Bluetail which was ex-Ericsson folks
Joe Armstrong's new book, published by Pragmatic Programmers who produced the famous Ruby "Pickaxe Book"
A new Ruby-inspired web framework, ErlyWeb

World domination is a long ways off, but there's more than one thing pointing in Erlang's favor right now.

PS: Erlang fans, what else would you add to this list?