On 02/03/07, Dave Thomas <dave / pragprog.com> wrote: > I love Ruby--I've done all my serious (and most of my not-so-serious) > work in Ruby since 2000. > > But that doesn't mean that I think it's the only solution--the > universal language. There are always going to be areas where other > tools excel. > > One of those areas is concurrent programming. As the world moves to > multi-core processors, and as we start to write applications > distributed across intra- and internets, we need to find better ways > to exploit all this extra power. If you've ever tried to write > concurrent programs in Java, or even Ruby, you know the challenges. > > Erlang is designed from the ground up to help programmers create > highly concurrently (read thousands or processes), highly reliable > (read 99.99999% uptime) applications. It's a real world language--it > is used to write telephone switches, banking applications, trading > systems...you name it. > > I like it for that reason. I also like it because it's different-- > very different. It makes me think about problems in a totally > different way. > > We were lucky to get Joe Armstrong, one of the inventors of Erlang, > to write our latest beta book, Programming Erlang. > > The book isn't being officially announced until next week, but I > thought the Ruby community might appreciate an early look. > > http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/jaerlang/ > > > > Cheers > > > Dave > Awesome. I've been meaning to learn Erlang for a while now. I'm definitely buying this, especially with Joe Armstrong involved. Farrel