Last day of Erlang Factory

Erlangers outside Old Session House

Even though every newspaper in every stand featured Michael Jackson’s death on the frontpages Magnus and I were more excited than ever. The second day of Erlang Factory were two hosts a new round of many exciting talks and it all began with the two keynotes: one by Simon Peyton-Jones and another by Kenneth Lundin.

Haskell and Erlang: Growing up together
For those of you who don’t know, Simon Peyton-Jones is one of the fathers of Haskell. He quoted his daugther saying “I know I’m not your first child. It’s ok.” Simon, an awesome rhetoric, filled the main hall of Erlang Factory with ease. His talk demonstrated Haskell’s and Erlang’s interdependent relationship since their inception which also happened to occur at roughly the same time. Haskell came from a university world, Erlang on the contrary originated from industry (read: Ericsson) and Simon pointed out some of the challenges that Haskell faced due to this. Of course Erlang faced other challenges. Challenges which offers many laughs today!

Erlang/OTP and Multicore Performance in Particular
Kenneth’s talk, compared to Simon’s, focused on the fine details of the inner core of Erlang; the virtual machine. For me, most of the things we’re hard to put in relation to anything else. Surely, most of the terms were familiar, but to really understand their work (which I’ve been told by a trustworthy source is awesome) I guess you either a) need more Erlang experience or b) have attended previous talks by Kenneth so that you can put the improvements he addressed in perspective. The one thought that struck me after this talk is Usain Bolt’s quote “Hard work and dedication.” That’s what the OTP team is for you, and the Erlang community!

Afterwards three new tracks kicked off, I attended the following two presentations and they “did it right”, i.e the presentation in itself.

Campfire loves Erlang
Mark Imbracio changed the polling service in Campfire, essentially what is underneath the Ruby front-end of 37signals messaging service, to use Erlang instead of C. By investing time in benchmarking Mark could show the impact of reducing the code base, adding extensibility, improving maintainability (1 OS process in Erlang compared to 240 C processes) and still being equally responsive! The talk contained a practical almost tangible discussion on where Erlang really shines.

An introduction to F#
Though not being an Erlang talk, Don Syme, managed to impress even Joe Armstrong with some of the stuff that they’ve built into F#. That would be the unit measurements in case you wonder. What Don did right was demonstrating the language in its relation to .net. Basically, a .dll of a F# program is usable by any other .net application. Through visual comparisons he efficiently high-lighted the large differences between C# and F#, and although the talk seemed to persuade C# programmers to use F#, he did a great job meeting the Erlangers.

Editor’s note: this post was written at Heathrow terminal 5 waiting for the plane sometime during the night between Saturday and Sunday.