Introduction

[Saifi]

Hi:

I would like to introduce myself as Saifi Khan and an Erlang newbie.

While taking reading Tim Bray's blog on CMT
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/06/20/Threads
I happened to read about Erlang.

I also read Joe's paper on Concurrency in Erlang at LL2.
The concept of Concurrency as a construct is quite interesting.

Couple of queries about Slides -

Q. [Create more processes than OS supports.]
   Does Erlang process imply threads here ?
   Are the processes (threads) here library managed ?
   Is there a documentation for the user API somewhere ?

Q. [Message Passing is "send and pray"]
   Is it UDP based communication ?

Q. [Erlang is used in Nortel Alteon SSL Accelerator]
   What feature has been implemented in Erlang ? Is it SSL ?
   (Looked a Nortel Site, but they have no data on Erlang).

Q. [Things in the world don't share data]
   Doesn't this make the program's inefficient ?
   In C programs we have shared data among various threads ?

Misc questions -

Q.  Is Erlang a functional programming language ?

Q. What is the best class of problems to solve with Erlang ?
     (The slides talk about soft real-time systems).

Q. What class of problems *cannot* be solved using Erlang ?
   (eg. with Java we don't do Systems programming).

Q. What are the new books on Erlang ?
     (could find only one on Amazon.com)

I am keen to learn more about the language and have a
C/C++/Java background.

Thanks in advance.

thanks
Saifi .        

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