Oh dear. After telling myself I wouldn’t I somehow managed to lunch out my Seven Languages in Seven Weeks oddyssey for 6 months. I had been most of the way through the Elixir section and then got distracted by a shiny object or something.Well, today I am back on the wagon and the way I am go …

Today’s installment was long and occasionaly annoying. Mostly because I felt that what I wanted to say in Elixir was on the tip of my tongue. I just didn’t quite yet have the language to say it. An occupational hazard when picking up new languages. We first looked at soome of the Elixi …

Elixir has been getting a lot of interest recently. It's a functional, concurrent language that compiles to bytecode for the Erlang VM. As well as concurrency, it has strong support for metaprogramming with hygenic macros — think Scheme but without all the parentheses. The syntax is really p …

I’ve finally finished myseven languages in seven weeks adventure. Ittook, as I’d oringinally expected, significantly morethan seven weeks, though the actual amount of time which I dedicatedwas only a couple of days more that the amount allocated in the book. It wasjust that the wee …

Its the last day of 2011, the yuletide festivities are over and I am on a mission to get Erlang wrapped. Today's installment focussed on concurrency, message processing, some of the Erlang's process monitoring, and IPC. It was all a bit boggling for me. But sort of cool. The excercises introduced m …

Erlang day two wasn't quite as swearing free as Erlang day one. You see I tend to swear when I’m stuck or baffled by syntax. And I git stuck a bit on the bonus problem. Turns out that putting []s round my variable made everything turn out nice. Who knew?Day two looks at branching, anony …

Bruce Tate introduces Erlang as making hard things easy and easy things hard. Which isn't entirely fair I guess, given that the things it makes hard are hard for good reason. Mutability is hard, but something to be avoided in concurrent systems, which is the area where Erlang's sweet spot is loca …

There is an idea, popularized in the Pragmatic Programmer book that its good to learn a new programming language every year. Seven Languages In Seven Weeks takes the concept one stage further, although clearly only for certain values of learning. One is never going to be proficient at any lan …