Hello Erlang ++ BEAM World (introductions thread)

Thanks! I’ve never experienced anything quite like it! My right cheek swelled up :exploding_head:

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Holy cats! I’ve had a lot of sinus infections in my life and I don’t think I ever had a cheek swell up from it. Wow.

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I’m told it’s rare, which concerned me, but all that is better now. Just still dealing with a bit fatigue. Will go back to doc this week if that doesn’t clear up by tomorrow. I might need to consider surgery as this is the third sinus infection within a year or so, might need to consider surgery. We shall see!

For a few weeks I felt fatigued and stuffy, but just assumed it was the weather. then I checked out of work one day per feeling fatigued to take a nap, woke up and BAM! The pain was well… The way I have described it to a few people it felt like a nano-sized gnome was walking around in the right side of my head with an ice pick randomly choosing places to poke it around :rofl:

Human rationalization is a stupendous thing, with an emphasis on stupid :wink:

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I’m loving reading all the introductions! It makes me very happy to see this new forum flourishing!

Is there any risk of that in this community? :wink:

Glad to hear your sinus infection is improving! I know people who get them regularly and they do not seem fun at all!

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Hello! :wave:

I’m ajfAfg from Japan. I love programming languages and I’ve been playing with many languages such as C, Python, OCaml and Prolog. Erlang is the best out of all of them! I can’t forget the first time I learned “Let it crash”.

I’m glad to join this community of people who love Erlang. Let’s make Erlang more more exciting! Thanks.

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Hi everyone. I am Dmitri and I live in the small town of Wellington, about 80Km from Cape Town in South Africa. I am 55 and new to programming. I love Erlang and although I am really struggling with it (as well as the concepts, I cannot give it up). I am also a “dad” to a Blue and Gold Macaw and when the weather is not too hot, I enjoy climbing on my bike and doing some riding to other towns and visiting their coffee shops - always with the laptop in the saddle bag (panier) :slight_smile:

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I enjoyed your slides! I teach a course where I distinguish between concurrency and parallelism, and it was nice to see your take :slight_smile:

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Hi, I’m Mark. I am a teaching professor at Tufts University (Medford, MA, USA), and I am an Erlang fan! Here is my Erlang story:

In ~2010 or so, I supervised an amazing team of students who were working on a capstone project. They were debating implementation languages/systems, and one of them had heard about Erlang. I encouraged them to do a “bake off” and do a small implementation of a tiny piece of their system (distributed, with needs to recover from failures). Erlang won hands down, and they did an incredible project! They didn’t need me for much, so I really didn’t learn Erlang at that time. They just showed me some stuff and walked me through it, but I didn’t write anything — they didn’t need me :-).

Years later (~2014) I was going to teach a course in concurrent programming. My own experience was with shared memory, locks, etc. I felt I should teach that stuff, but my view was that it’s like an assembly language: a programmer should know at least one so they understand what is going on under the covers and so they can fix things when bugs crop up; but mostly you shouldn’t program that way. For concurrency, we need something designed from the ground up to be concurrent. I had been exposed to CSP in grad school, but I remembered my former students’ project and investigated Erlang more myself. I was trying to decide between Erlang and Golang, and I discussed it with one of the students from the old team, who had since gone on to program in both. Erlang was the winner again!

That course uses Erlang for about 4–5 weeks, shared memory threads (in Python) for about a month, and then students do project.

I really enjoy Erlang, and so I often do small things to help me run my classes. I would like to be more comfortable with larger projects, and maybe this forum will get me off my butt to learn more! Also, maybe my students can get some project ideas from the forum!

Thank you for creating the forum!

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Have you thought about writing an Erlang book Mark? Perhaps one that teaches functional programming and just happens to use Erlang?

One of my favourite books (A Well Grounded Rubyist) was written by a university professor (although it was a different field) and after reading some of your posts here I just know what you’d come up with would be good! :003:

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LOL I do appreciate your confidence — thank you! I don’t see how I have the time (or even enough good ideas) as it stands. I’d be happy to discuss/brainstorm, though.

An intro to programming based on FP could easily use Erlang. A conventional class of that sort would just use the sequential part of the language. I suppose one could translate at least some of How To Design Programs from Racket to Erlang. But that seems to waste a great opportunity!

A better intro course would, of course, use concurrency. Mitch Resnick has done great stuff with kids, and there is concurrency in his work. I think a BEAM language could be amazing for this, and, in fact, one was used: The BlockyTalky system (BlockyTalky), at least at one point, used Elixir. Matt Ahrens, who is just now trying to finish his PhD did the implementation. That was a blocks-based programming of small devices.

I would love to see a creative intro course that got students into text-based (rather than blocks-based) programming but with an easy-to-use way to create independent communicating objects. Perhaps with a bunch of pre-built graphics stuff, maybe some simplified Erlang behaviors or macros to make things easier…

I don’t have a concrete enough vision though, and I don’t really have the time to formulate it. It is an interesting idea!

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I also had sinus issues until my neighbour suggested that I try the following (which sounds terrible but it worked). She suggested that I fill up 1/2 glass of water and put 1 teaspoon of salt into it and stir it. Then put that into a wide bowl and inhale that water / salt through your nose.

Let me tell you, I thought that I was drowning and burning at the same time. Spluttering and coughing (for some weird reason) all over the place. It was terrible but I did that each morning and evening for 3 days and sinus issues are gone. I live in an area where sinus is an issue as we have many pollen trees.

I know it sounds terrible (and it is) but it works. Maybe there is a more pleasant way (I sure hope so).

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Hello Erlangers and BEAMers! :wave:

I’m Michael and I live in Chicago. I’ve been using Elixir at work for 3-4 years now but I have recently started learning Erlang because RabbitMQ’s khepri project is so cool!

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Hello and gruess euch!

I’m Benjamin a software engineer from behind the alps (Austria) and an avid erlang user. Most of my professional work is in other languages and paradigms but here and there I manage to sneak in some erlang for internal tooling and load testing.

I was fascinated by erlang, otp and the beam right off the bat when I first decided learning erlang two years ago (after a short stint with elixir). It opened my mind and it exaggerated my interest in concurrency oriented programming and distributed systems.
I’m certain that the knowledge gained from reading erlang books, code written by experienced erlangers and watching talks about erlang (especially Joes talks) helped me immensely in my job and in my professional development.
Although it it sometimes makes my day to day programming with Akka a little bit harder as I am always thinking “doing it with erlang would be soo much simpler”. :wink:

Anyhow enough about me. I am happy to be a part of this great community and I decided to finally bite the bullet and end my lurker existence.

Cheers!

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Hi all,

I am Dieter. I am living and working in Vienna, Austria.

In my company I am working on testing systems for spacecrafts, doing this for
over 20 years now and it is still fun.

I came into contact with Erlang via a colleague who attended a conference for functional
software. He is mainly interested in Haskell, but he also told us about a talk about a weird language,
Erlang.

I love the pragmatic and reality-driven approach of the language and the whole ecosystem.
Just the introspection features of the observer and being able to shell into a running release are
outstanding.

Right now I am writing on a prototype which I will try to sell to my management.

What else…
Currently I am locked away in my appartment, due to being infected with Covid.
It’s not so bad, I just lost a lot of energy. I do hope that will come back, because I recently
ordered a gravel bike, should be here soon now.
In the first lockdown I made my amateur radio license. That’s an ideal hobby for such a time, I think.

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Interesting way you got into Erlang. You should be fine by now. Best wishes. :hugs::hugs::hugs:

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Brave and funny. May your productivity in Erlang be rewarding.

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Welcome to the forum, and wishing you a speedy recovery!

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Hello World!

I’m Johan, living in Luleå (northern part of Sweden). I’m working at Cisco and use Erlang everyday.

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Hello

I am a beginner to Erlang and Nitrogen. I hope to create a browser mmo in Erlang and Nitrogen one day and share it.

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thats cool!

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