Erlang

Hello World in Erlang

Every programming journey starts with Hello World. Let’s write our first Erlang program and explore what makes this concurrent functional language tick.

The Code

Create a file named hello.erl: …

Variables and Types in Erlang

Erlang is a dynamically typed, functional language where all data is immutable and variables are single-assignment. Once a variable is bound to a value, it cannot be changed within the same scope. …

Channels, Actors, and Goroutines: The Concurrency Models That Divided Language Design

In 1973, Carl Hewitt published a paper describing something he called the Actor model — isolated computational units that communicated exclusively by message passing, with no shared memory, no locks, …

The Many Ways to Fail: Error Handling Philosophies Across Programming Languages

Every program that has ever run has eventually encountered something unexpected. A file that wasn’t there. A network that dropped the connection. A number that divided by zero. A user who typed …

Who Taught Your Language to Remember? A Tour of Memory Management

In our three-part series on web backend performance, we measured idle memory ranging from 3 MB (Rust) to 500 MB (Spring Boot). We noted that a garbage collector explained much of Java’s …