[erlang-questions] Erlang Intro/Evangelism Presentation -- Starbucks!

[Edmond Begumisa]

MESSAGE-PASSING @ STARBUCKS

"... I started to think about how Starbucks processes drink orders.  
Starbucks, like most other businesses is primarily interested in  
maximizing throughput of orders. More orders equals more revenue. As a  
result they use asynchronous processing ..."

"... we can see that the real world is often asynchronous. Our daily lives  
consists of many coordinated, but asynchronous interactions...  
asynchronous messaging architecture can often be a natural way to model  
these types of interactions... also means that often we can look at daily  
life to help design successful messaging solutions ..."*

http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings/18_starbucks.html

I hope I'm not too late with this, but I really liked this old article by  
Google's Gregor Hohpe on asynchronous message passing. He wasn't talking  
explicitly about Erlang but the content should resonate instantaneously  
with Erlang programmers while at the same time being insightful for  
non-Erlangers. You might want to reference a few of his well-worded  
analogies for evangelising some of the core ideas built into Erlang.

*Joe Armstrong made a similar compelling argument at the beginning of his  
book. As a relatively new Erlang programmer myself, _THIS_ is the main  
line of argument that convinced me to try out the Erlang environment.  
Particularly the implications on concurrency which I had struggled with in  
other environments (in retrospect, it was because those environments  
didn't have these ideas built-in or actively encouraged -- I've found  
Erlang does a lot of hand-holding to make sure you do the sane thing in  
order to avoid painting yourself into a corner -- something you could  
emphasise in your presentation.)

- Edmond -


On Sat, 04 Dec 2010 05:43:34 +1100, Ryan Zezeski <rzezeski@REDACTED>  
wrote:

> I've been tasked with giving an introductory level presentation on  
> Erlang at
> work.  The focus is on why you would use Erlang and what does it look  
> like
> on the surface level.  We have a lot of your standard Java/C#/C  
> developers
> and this will act as a potential launching pad to introducing Erlang to  
> the
> company.  There is the potential for a large number of people to video
> conference into this possibly spanning several countries so I really  
> want to
> knock this out of the park.
>
> I'm writing as an inquiry for links to any prior art that I may use for
> inspiration or even steal and use as my own.  Anything that you think  
> might
> be helpful is appreciated, even input on possible approaches.  I'd really
> like to hear from people who have done this sort of thing before, i.e.  
> pubic
> speaking on Erlang.
>
> Thanks,
> -Ryan


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