[erlang-questions] Chicago Erlang Conference --- a dabbler's take

[Lloyd R. Prentice]

This post may be a stretch for this list but I humbly post it on grounds that it deals with Erlang questions in the large rather than nitty gritty "how do I..."

First off, I can no longer refer to myself as a newbie since I've been hanging around too long. But I can't pass off as a wizard since I'm not. I do strive to plunge deeply into Erlang, but dabbler sounds about right.

So, I spent a brain-frying day in Chicago last Monday breathing the fumes of exciting ideas and shaking hands with an impressive posse of Erlang leading lights. You missed much if you missed out.

Since, no doubt, the videos of the presentations will soon pop up on the web, I'll just say that, for the most part, they  dove deeply into the arcana of keeping complex Erlang systems and clusters running in top form. I learned much--- mostly how much I have yet to learn.

Random personal highlights:

Reid Draper --- Building Fault Tolerant Teams at Basho:  A jaw-droppingly impressive overview of how to test and turn out gold-standard software.

Irons Guberman -- Maximizing Throughput on Multicore; How to get more bang for the buck from Erlang.  Super slides.

Garrett Smith --- Writing Quality Code in Erlang; As an old Forth guy I felt right at home. Factor, factor, factor until you distill out the essence of your solution in all its crystal clarity. Garrett was definitely channeling Chuck Moore.

Brian Troutwine --- Monitoring Complex Systems; I hope I'm never in Brian's shoes. But if I ever have a complex system to wrangle, Brian would be the kind of guy I'd want by my side.

Jesse Gumm --- Building Web Scale Apps with Nitrogen; Jesse exploded on the stage and wrote a non-trivial web app before our eyes in less than 40 minutes. Yeow!

Other speakers were equally engaging, but not as close to my personal needs and interests.

The big questions rumbled to the surface during the after-conference party. 

- Several Erlang newbies took on Joe Armstrong: "Why are libraries so inconsistent, documentation so sparse, and Erlang so hard to learn?" Joe held his own, but no doubt these questions will persist.

- A group of Elixir groupies made a strong case for their new puppy. Thinking about learning one more language makes my head hurt. But the converging?/diverging? paths of old and new will be fun to watch.

- And, finally, during waning minutes of the party, Garrett Smith told me that Erlang should be completely rewritten from the ground up. He's tried with e2, but there's no interest. 

Maybe Garrett was just worn out following weeks on a job well done.

Best to all,

LRP