[erlang-questions] General advice on FP (& Erlang)

[Milen Georgiev Dzhumerov]

Hi all,

I've got a couple of questions. I'm probably not the first person who  
is struggling to switch to a functional mindset. So, hopefully, any  
replies to my questions will help other people too!

The way I got started is by reading the "Programming Erlang" book by  
Joe (great book btw). As I was reading the book, everything seemed so  
obvious and easy but when I'm trying to do something myself - I just  
can't. I always go back to my "shared state" mind and don't seem to  
be able come up with a design and a plan on how to implement it.

So, what are you guys (who get FP) suggesting I do? I think the  
problem comes from having C hardwired into my brain and I can't get  
it out.

And I definitely have got to ask this - how are we supposed to mutate  
state? Using processes? Function calls? I just can't wrap my head  
around how some C code is going to be translated.

Let's take a simple example. I'm writing a network app in Erlang  
which accepts "messages" on a socket, where a "message" is defined as  
length:content. If I was to do this in C, I would have a function  
which gets called every time bytes arrive on the socket and then  
depending on which state I'm in, I'm either going to append the bytes  
to a length buffer and when I reach the ":" character, I'll change  
the state and start appending to the content buffer (while  
decrementing the number of bytes still left to be read).
Now all of this depends on having access to mutable buffers (& a  
counter) outside the scope of the functions - at this point I'm lost  
on how to do it in Erlang. How would guys start solving this problem?  
Obviously, the more experience you have, the less thinking you're  
going to put into this and the solution is going to come up  
naturally, but what about people who haven't had any real world  
experience with FP?

Thanks,
Milen
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