[erlang-questions] Erlang for youngsters

[Evgeny M]

Imo the best tutorial for a beginner in any language (for someone who has 
experience in other ones) is something intermediate and familiar using some 
ready framework. Some thing which allows him/her to write in a hour 
something he used to build in other language. Often it is possible to do 
this even without knowing the language almost altogether. Like, tutorial on 
Django is a great way to start learning python. Something like this could 
be created for Erlang, either over pure Cowboy, or ChicagoBoss, or 
whatever. Just a dumb step by step (type this, run that) tutorial which can 
be done by anyone who has any programming background. In the end there will 
be a working site with forms, POSTs and other fancy stuff. I for one 
learned myself both python and erlang exactly this way (using Django and 
CB), skipping all the boring stuff.
Doing hellowords, compiling modules, doing releases and other stuff like 
that is really very boring. You can do it later.

Also I'd say talking about concurrency should start with OTP, and introduce 
spawn() later. First, OTP gen_server is just easier than standard 
spawn/receive  for anyone with OO background. Second,  spawn/receive is too 
similar to standard approaches to multithreading in mainstream languages 
and it is harder to see all the benefits of Erlang supervision and workers.

Erlang as a language looks very hard for two weeks, then it suddenly 
becomes very easy (as a language, concurrency is always hard). Recursion is 
hard in any language without pattern matching.

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