In the last few weeks I’ve been seeing more and more chatter about Erlang, a language from Ericsson that is primarily used in telecommunications applications with soft real-time, distributed, concurrent, fault-tolerant properties. It would seem that the section of the blogosphere I’m following (mostly trend-setter developers) are taking an interest in how useful it may be outside of applications like running telco switch equipment.

I first stumbled across Erlang almost a decade ago when it was first released and was considering a roll-out of Eddie, which at the time was the only software solution to load-balancing that looked like it might actually work. That project got canned, but I’ve always had this niggle that I should go and play with Erlang some more and that there had to be ways of being able to use the unique qualities of Erlang to do interesting work in terms of Internet - and specifically Web - applications.

David Pollak’s article on why implementing Twitter in Erlang might be a good idea confirmed in me the idea that at least Erlang’s fans think its time might have come for concurrent web applications and got me thinking. What would I do with this highly scalable, distributed and concurrent system in terms of a web application that would scare me if I were to attempt doing them in Rails/Ruby?

So, I rolled this around in my head a little bit, and am thinking that in a month or two’s time it might be nice to try and build some interesting applications in Erlang - nothing ground-breaking, just experiments in scalability, maybe a Twitter-clone to see whether David’s hunch is right. In the process, pick up a new vocabulary to think about software in terms of how Erlang sees the World. I’ve already noticed from the FAQ that it has some quirks (a couple of basic string manipulation functions in the httpd_util library for ‘historical reasons’ is making me think it needs some love as a language), but I’m intrigued enough to want to learn more.

Whilst the free resources on the official site look comprehensive, I was mildly relieved from my experiences with their Rails/Ruby titles to notice that the Pragmatic Programmer’s have released a beta of an Erlang title that at first glance seems to be pretty comprehensive already, and of a similar style to the Ruby/Rails titles from that stable.

I always get a little nervy when making friends with a new language, especially one that describes the World in a way that’s new to me. Over the next month or two I’m going to be going through the resources and building a few toy applications to help me on my way. I’ve got a lot of work to get done in Ruby and Rails though, so I hope I don’t get too deep, too quick, or the landlord will be calling again…