[erlang-questions] first erlang program

[Steve Davis]

I'm going to rebut my previous post!

Whenever I'm creating a useful application I now "naturally" resort to 
using OTP support, but it's not strictly necessary. In fact, if you are 
learning it may not be very productive to introduce too many parts of the 
platform in one go. The next thing to understand is actually just nodes and 
node communication in the core erlang modules.

Secondly, I'm not sure the sieve is a good candidate for an algorithm to 
distribute since the outcome of each calculation is reliant on all previous 
calculations. You may consider a different program that has parts that can 
be obviously partitioned out into independent blocks of processing.

best,
/s

On Sunday, January 6, 2013 5:44:27 AM UTC-6, Steve Davis wrote:
>
> Hm ok. By "throw in more hardware" you are meaning you wish to take 
> advantage of distribution as well as concurrency. Perhaps I should have 
> been more specific about the context of scaling I was talking about, 
> namely, vertical. You see, while this version of the program should be able 
> to use all the cores (which without more work, I don't guarantee), and 
> won't exhaust resources (which is easy to prove), it also won't (and was 
> not designed to) distribute across nodes. 
>
> For that, the next step is that you need to turn eratos into a gen server 
> inside an OTP application... You will need to consider in the next 
> iteration of design what parts of the processing you are distributing, what 
> messages need to be passed between distributed nodes. This may mean some 
> thought about how elements of the algorithm can be separated 
> efficiently. For all the "magic" of OTP, you will likely find that what 
> erlang is rather good at is facing you with the real problem you are trying 
> to solve rather than to allowing you to get distracted inside "boilerplate" 
> code.
>
> When I started learning the many capabilities of Erlang, I found that as 
> well as the documentation's manuals, Joe's book was the most helpful guide 
> for me... http://pragprog.com/book/jaerlang/programming-erlang (which 
> IIRC may be being updated to a new edition as I write) BTW this is not to 
> deny the quality of other books on Erlang (e.g. I have not read LYSE), but 
> rather that Joe's book happened to fit my approach to learning.
>
> regs,
> /s
>
> On Saturday, January 5, 2013 9:16:30 PM UTC-6, rusi wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 9:13 PM, Steve Davis <steven.cha...@REDACTED>wrote:
>>
>>> And... for fun... a refactored version that should scale and also avoid 
>>> io:format:
>>>
>>
>> Thanks Steve for your efforts.
>> Now if I wanted to 'see' the scaling what do I have to do/setup?
>>
>> Just for context: I am demoing this to a class of noobs (more noob than 
>> me if thats possible :D) on a 4-core laptop mostly on linux but could also 
>> use windows.
>>
>> I suppose I could hook up another machine with a back-to-back ethernet 
>> cable.
>> Naturally I would prefer to 'scale up the scaling-up measurement'
>> ie first erlang-ecosystem methods
>> then linux processes methods
>> then throwing more 'hard' hardware
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20130106/2a2172c9/attachment.htm>