An avian carrier's blog – Erlang

J'entends régulièrement des industriels se plaindre qu'il est difficile de trouver des ressources sur Erlang en français pour leurs ingénieurs (tout le monde n'est pas parfaitement anglophone). Ils seront heureux d'apprendre que le livre Erlang programming de Francesco Cesarini et Simon Thompson a été traduit en français par Éric Jacoboni et est distribué par Pearson Education sous le nom Programmer en Erlang.

J'ai eu la chance d'être impliqué en tant que relecteur technique pour ce livre. Non seulement je trouve que le travail de traduction a été fait de façon extrêmement rigoureuse (révélant même au passage certaines erreurs dans les exemples originaux), mais en plus j'ai pris énormément de plaisir à relire les deux versions, anglaise et française, de ce livre passionnant pour ceux qui veulent programmer en Erlang.

Le livre couvre aussi bien les bases que l'utilisation avancée des fonctions de traces et de débogage. Il aborde Mnesia et les comportements OTP. Il explique comment tester des modules et des programmes Erlang. Bref, que du bon.

Note: ceci n'est pas un publireportage ; je ne touche pas un seul centime sur les exemplaires vendus ni pour l'écriture de ce billet.

I'll follow Dave Ray and will try to say something nice about a bunch of programming languages I use or have used seriously:

• Ada – The only language I would trust my life to.

• C – It gets things done easily in a controlled space when resources are scarce. I use it in many embedded situations, often with FreeRTOS.

• C++ – Its templating system with specialization beats everything I know. When I worked on Urbi at Gostai, I had a lot of pleasure using it.

• Erlang – The language to use to develop distributable parallel applications. I wrote many programs for research projects with it.

• Factor – One of the languages I feel the most comfortable with. I really like the reverse polish notation and the powerful combinators. I use it for many personal and teaching projects.

• Forth – Forth is one of the languages that I have been liking since the first time I heard about it. Its conciseness, simplicity, grammar and ease of implementation beats almost everything when it comes to size on very small embedded systems. I used it to write a Forth compiler targetting the Microchip PIC16Fxxx microcontrollers family.

• Haskell – I started using it when I had to send patches for Darcs. I really love monads, and I also love explaining them in class. My window manager configuration is also written in Haskell.

• J – It is unbeatable if you have RSI and need to type as little characters as possible for a task that can be applied to a whole array. I use it mostly to solve Project Euler problems.

• Java – Well, everyone knows it so it may be used to explain a simple concept. Is that nice enough?

• Javascript – Javascript lets us do things in the browser I would not have imagined five years ago. For example, this web page is static but includes Twitter updates and comments, thanks to Javascript. On the server side, I use it within a CouchDB database where I store a whole web application; it dynamically generates iCalendar views for multiple people from data gathered at TVrage.com using their XML API.

• Python – I can hack anything in a few minutes and still be able to read it later. I wrote a Forth compiler for the Microchip PIC18Fxxx microcontrollers family with it.

• Ruby – Feels like Python, only more functional and cleaner. I would use it more if I had not been bitten by threading unstability on Sparc64Linux in the past (for the will-spam-for-food.eu.org service we ran with Pierre Beyssac and Thomas Quinot). Ruby helps me run this blog.

• Scala – There comes a useful, powerful and pleasant to use language targetting the Java virtual machine. I used it to write my HarassMe Android application.

I probably forgot some languages in the list. However, if I use them, I am sure I can tell something nice about them.