Erlang: A New Way to Program That's 20 Years Old

Since I partly learnt programming at college and was taught about CSP and Occam, erlang's lightweight processes and inter-process communication model are very appealing. And it's interesting to see a number of projects get written in it, and since even Facebook is using it... :-)<p>This particular article references Tim Bray's attempts to use erlang for web log processing. He found erlang to be very slow because of the I/O implementation, and criticized it for its regular expression handling. This seems like a silly test since surely you'd use Perl and friends for something like that.<p>Personally, I'm interested in building something with erlang just to get my feet wet with the language. And I'd be interested to hear about the experiences of others with erlang in real projects.

For those of us who program in Erlang calling it 'weird' is a compliment :-) I think it's like complaining about parenthesis to a Lisper ...<p>Both Lisp and Erlang make you think is a different way that once you get into that mode of thinking you really do become more efficient.

I recently tried Erlang and it was fun, but I am not that excited by it anymore. It could do with some convenience features, like arrays. List module could be imported per default and stuff like that. I ended up having to write my own methods for fairly standard things (could have been because of my lack of experience with Erlang, though). And I only did some simple project euler problems, nothing big.

That article's horse crap. Do they not have any better criticism of Erlang other than "it's weird"?