Thread: External Interfaces

Erlang is not just about building pro¬grams within it-self; Erlang can even interface with other languages like C, PHP etc. without much difficulty using extensions.
As you can understand, Erlang is in¬teresting, the features that it provides to a developer are quite path breaking and in some cases revolutionary, nothing you might expect from such an old lan¬guage. Which brings us to the larger question; if you are developer, should you learn Erlang?

Erlang is a 20-year-old language and the implementation does show it's age, making Erlang fundamentally quite different from other program¬ming languages, which makes it not a particularly an easy language to learn.



For instance, take the case of the most languages. In Erlang though you might be able to assign X as 3 by using a statement like X=3, an attempt to re-as¬sign another value to X by using a state¬ment like X=4 will result in an error, simply because '=' is not treated as an operator. If you are used to other higher-level programming languages, you will find more such idiosyncrasies. In Erlang however, many of these would be considered as "weird".

But that said, if you have a back¬ground in C, Java, C++ or such, most of you could learn and write non-trivial programs in Erlang in under a month. Non-programmers or CIO's and Pro¬gram Manager's can also appreciate Er¬lang's abilities with a little more effort, at least from the implementation point of view.

In either case, if you plan to create robust software, servers or web applica¬tions that can handle millions of users without crashing and can scale up in a jiffy, give Erlang a go. You might change your opinion about 'old' things.