<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>Very cool... and unusual for Erlang. Well, I will be at Erlang Factory this year, so maybe some of us physicists (ex and otherwise) can</div><div>discuss it over a beer.</div><div><br></div><div>Jared K</div><div><br><div><div>On Mar 15, 2012, at 11:56 AM, pietje wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0;margin-left: 0.8ex;border-left: 1px #ccc solid;padding-left: 1ex;"><p>Hi All,<br></p></blockquote><div>Just my 2 cents.</div><div>I am an ex physicist too. Used to do research on QCD (Drell-Yan process) calculating Feynman diagrams.</div><div><br></div><div>For a couple of years I've been busy writing an erlang program to handle Feynman diagrams algebraically. Lots of fun. </div><div><br></div><div>regards, Pieter Rijken</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0;margin-left: 0.8ex;border-left: 1px #ccc solid;padding-left: 1ex;"><p>______________________________<wbr>_________________<br>erlang-questions mailing list<br><a href="mailto:erlang-questions@erlang.org" target="_blank">erlang-questions@erlang.org</a><br><a href="http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions" target="_blank">http://erlang.org/mailman/<wbr>listinfo/erlang-questions</a><br></p><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></blockquote><br>On Monday, 12 March 2012 02:34:04 UTC+1, Jared Kofron wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0;margin-left: 0.8ex;border-left: 1px #ccc solid;padding-left: 1ex;">Hi All,<br>I've been using Erlang at work for a few years now, and I thought I'd throw my experience out there, as <br>my application is a little different than what you usually see on the list - I am a graduate student at the<br>Center for Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Washington, and use Erlang extensively<br>in my work.<p>In my experience, something that Erlang is really great at but doesn't receive much attention for these days<br>is managing and interacting with hardware. In any physics experiment of even modest sizes, you wind up<br>having to keep track of the state of various pieces of equipment, often modify that state, and constantly <br>interrogate particular values. For example, we might want to change the current in a magnetic trap, turn<br>that trap off altogether, or simply read back the voltage drop across our superconducting magnet.</p><p>So far, I have deployed Erlang in this zone for two separate experiments (SNO+, a large particle physics<br>experiment in Canada) and Project 8 (a small nuclear physics experiment here in Seattle). Both times have<br>been great successes, and I have found the reception of Erlang in this market to be great. In general, what<br>I have done is wrap a hardware management layer with some kind of outside world interface. For SNO+, we<br>used Webmachine and RESTful control, and for Project 8 we actually conduct all communication <br>by using CouchDB as a message passing interface.</p><p>Physicists are suspicious creatures, but once you demonstrate the feature set that you get for practically<br>free with OTP, they see the advantage pretty quickly. On top of that, the development cycle for sophisticated <br>applications can be greatly reduced - more than once it made my group float to the top in terms of meeting<br>goals.</p><p>In short, as far as I am concerned, Erlang has found a new niche in the world of Physics, and I intend to <br>spread the word as much as I can!</p><p>Jared Kofron<br>______________________________<wbr>_________________<br>erlang-questions mailing list<br><a href="mailto:erlang-questions@erlang.org" target="_blank">erlang-questions@erlang.org</a><br><a href="http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions" target="_blank">http://erlang.org/mailman/<wbr>listinfo/erlang-questions</a><br></p><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></blockquote>_______________________________________________<br>erlang-questions mailing list<br><a href="mailto:erlang-questions@erlang.org">erlang-questions@erlang.org</a><br>http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions<br></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>