Comments on: Popularizing Erlang

By: Erlang-China » Blog Archive » [blah]Popularizing Erlang

Erlang-China » Blog Archive » [blah]Popularizing Erlang — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 06:54:25 +0000

[...] kevin Ã§Å¡â€žÃ¤Â¸â‚¬Ã§Â¯â€¡Popularizing ErlangÃ¯Â¼Å’kevin Ã¦??Ã¥Ë†Â°Ã¯Â¼Å¡ My idea for popularizing Erlang is simple: write the code needed to make Erlang [...]

By: Amr

Amr — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 15:49:33 +0000

Sounds like a great idea! have you published any such code. I would be interested in any erlang work being done in the systems/admin space.. just curious as to what is possible..

By: Hypothetical Labs » Feed Parsing

Hypothetical Labs » Feed Parsing — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:57:22 +0000

[...] Yesterday’s post and the responses to it has put me in the mood to get the ball rolling and port something. Since I’m working on an online Erlang feed reader, I’ve been thinking that Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Universal Feed Parser might be a good candidate. Unless something equivalent already exists in the Erlang world, but the Google magic 8 ball seems to say “all signs point to no”. [...]

By: Jan

Jan — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:31:58 +0000

Heya Kevin,
if you want to get your hands dirty with Erlang and
help out with CouchDb, drop us a line! My contact
info is on my website, Damien’s at his’; damienkatz.net

Cheers,
Jan
–

By: Mike McNally

Mike McNally — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:45:54 +0000

There’s nothing about Erlang (other than the quoted-string syntactic sugar) that makes it impossible to implement Unicode-handling libraries that operate on binary data types.

As a server-side person myself, one of the important tools I see as being necessary (Mnesia’s existance notwithstanding) is something like what JDBC is to the Java world: connectivity to tradional relational databases. I don’t think that’d be a super-hard thing to do, but it wouldn’t be trivial.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:26:40 +0000

Regarding strings being stored as lists of integers (not bytes) in erlang: Yes this is not as nice as some other languages but the tools are available to convert these lists into various unicode representations (see xmerl_ucs.erl in OTP) and other character sets (see libiconv bindings in jungerl) should the need arise.

By: kevin

kevin — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:33:48 +0000

@jerith – You’re completely correct. I was thinking about Ruby and Erlang when I wrote this and I confused the two. I guess the lack of baked-in Unicode support still makes me a bit uneasy regardless of how strings are stored. It hasn’t hurt me yet and I can’t really point to any reasons why it might, but I can’t help but think that it might someday.

@evgen – Total agreement. Erlang needs practical, useful code. My impression is that there’s quite a bit of useful code available now but it’s not really publicized. So I guess I see the job as twofold: a) Talk about the useful bits of Erlang available today and b) write more useful bits for the future.

Hmmmm…I really like the idea of picking packages and just porting them straight to Erlang.

By: evgen

evgen — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:20:31 +0000

One of the best things that Erlang evangelists can do is not just to write Erlang code, but to write Erlang code that will help other people get things done. Python, Perl, and Ruby all have a large collection of useful modules available that makes these languages easy choices for most problems. Erlang hackers need to pick a module/package of the week and port it.

By: jerith

jerith — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 15:29:22 +0000

Erlang’s strings are lists of integers, not lists of bytes. This means you get multibyte characters for free. They’re still lists, though, which means you can use the standard lists:foo() functions on them.

I’m still not sure whether a new string type would be better, but I haven’t run into any issues with strings that a simple flatten() didn’t fix.

By: Dave Fayram

Dave Fayram — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 14:55:40 +0000

Ack, due to a copy-n-paste error, I didn’t give the right URL link in my previous comment to fuzed. This one links correctly.

Sheesh, now I’ve linked a twitter spammer I was reporting. :\