Intro to Erlang*

*and the BEAM

Who am I?

  • Erik Nilsen
  • enilsen16 on most places
  • I tweet about random things
  • Work at answerky
  • In Brisbane and QUT as part of the Hotdesq program.

What I hope you get from this talk

  • Well thought out language
  • Being used in interesting ways
  • Distributed Computing is cool
  • I want to leave you curious :D

What you won't get from this talk

  • Deep dive into OTP
  • Live coding examples
  • Almost every slide in this presentation could be it's own talk.

For more information on any of these topics come talk to me.

The Actor Model

  • Individual actors can only modify their own state
  • To communicate with other actors they pass messages
  • This concept was co-created by Carl Hewitt

So what is Erlang?

Erlang is a general-purpose programming language and runtime environment. Erlang has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. Erlang is used in several large telecommunication systems from Ericsson.

http://erlang.org/faq/introduction.html

Cool...

What Does that MEAN?

  • Erlang is a functional programming language with a large emphasis on Concurrency and High Reliability.
  • Pattern Matching and Immutable data are core features
  • Erlang allows for dozens of tasks or processes to preform at the same time. (Actor Model)
  • Each process runs separately inside BEAM, the virtual machine.
  • Message passing between processes is the only way to interact.

More on Erlangs Processes

  • Because each one of these processes is lightweight and isolated, communication is explicit and safe. (Avoid locks)
  • You can have millions of processes at once
  • You can manage these processes with Supervisors
  • These Supervisors monitor and restart processes

Why was it created?

  • When you are building systems, you're going to have failures that are out of your control. (Hardware, Network Layer Failures, Etc..)
  • Their also may be bugs, that only happen in certain situations. (These can be extremely hard to reproduce.)
  • When programming telecom systems or 911 call centers you can't afford for the entire system to go down.

Who created it?

  • Ericsson wrote the first version in 1986
  • Originally written in Prolog(Hence the syntax)

OTP Overview

BEAM Use case
Standard Library Erlang
Common Test, Eunit Testing Frameworks
Mnesia A Database
ETS A key/value store(in memory)
Dialyzer A type checker

http://erlang.org/doc/applications.html

There's a lot more...

Erlangs ability to work with other languages

  • C and C++
  • Java
  • Ruby
  • Rust
  • Python

Who Uses Erlang?

  • League Of Legends chat system(Riot Games)
  • WhatsApp, Whisper, FB Messenger
  • Almost all telecom companies
  • Adroll(for real time bidding)
  • Ericsson(Currently developing 5G)
  • Basho Riak, RabbitMQ
  • A lot more

A short look at the Erlang Syntax

-module(count_to_ten).

-export([count_to_ten/0]).

 

count_to_ten() -> do_count(0).


do_count(10) -> 10;
do_count(N) -> do_count(N + 1).

Other Languages That Run on BEAM

  • Elixir (Ruby Like)
  • Lisp flavored Erlang(lfe)
  • Alpaca(ML like syntax)

Elixir

  • Written by Jose Valim
  • Ruby-like syntax
  • Popular Libraries around it
  • Includes improved tooling
  • Modern community

Show me the Numbers

ErLang SYTAX Example

Elixir Sytax Example

-module(count_to_ten).

-export([count_to_ten/0]).


count_to_ten() -> do_count(0).


do_count(10) -> 10;
do_count(N) -> do_count(N + 1).
defmodule CountToTen do
  def count_to_ten do
    do_count(0)
  end

  defp do_count(10), do: 10
  defp do_count(x) do
    do_count(x+1)
  end
end

Popular Erlang and Elixir Projects

  • Nerves
  • Phoenix
  • QuickCheck
  • Riak

How does Erlang Apply to Distributed Computing

Well First why is distributed Computing hard?

I mean this is a mostly solved problem right

*slide from http://bit.ly/2qVavtl

What is the problem?

*slide from http://bit.ly/2qVavtl

*slide from http://bit.ly/2qVavtl

*slide from http://bit.ly/2qVavtl

Well, how is this actually sort of Solved?

With CRDTs...

Projects in Distributed Computing

  • Distributed Erlang
  • Riak Core
  • Erleans
  • Lasp
  • Loquat

It's an exciting time to be an erlang or Elixir Developer

People To follow in the BEAM Community

  • Fred Hubert
  • Jose Valim
  • James Fish
  • Robert Virding(Erlang Co-Creator)
  • Joe Armstrong(Erlang Co-Creator)

People to follow in Distributed Computing

  • Carl Hewitt
  • Christopher Meiklejohn

  • Tristan Sloughter

Where to learn more

  • http://learnyousomeerlang.com/
  • https://pragprog.com/book/elixir13/programming-elixir-1-3
  • https://github.com/h4cc/awesome-elixir

Fin

Intro to Erlang*

By enilsen16

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Intro to Erlang*

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