Our meeting can be summed up with this quote from Bryan Hunter:
"I first learned of Erlang in 2007 while on a six-week consulting engagement in Oslo, Norway. In a sea of leaky C++, tower-of-babel class hierarchies and endless event storms there was one patch of calm: it was an Erlang system that had been running for years with no bugs and with no downtime. I was stunned. When I got back to Nashville I picked up Joe Armstong’s book (listed below) and have been digging in ever since.
Erlang is a beautiful (and fun) language, and its pattern matching is simply amazing. When asked on Twitter “Why Erlang?” here’s my answer: “Erlang is open source, cross-platform and proven. It simplifies writing safe, concurrent, distributed code.”
At a certain point it started to seem like a real shame that so few .NET developers were familiar with Erlang. A team of C# and Erlang developers is a force to be reckoned with because Erlang and .NET are complements. Each is lousy at what the other is exceptional at. Realizing this can save a company a lot of time, money and headaches.
Well, how do you even get started? How does a .NET shop begin to evaluate Erlang? How do you interop .NET and Erlang code? That’s what I hope this talk helped with."
So we say an introduction to Erlang and realized that the syntax and functional language is very different from what we're used to with C#. But I can see that in a distributed processing application with a high volume of messages that need to be acted on and/or routed efficiently and reliably, Erlang is a compelling choice.
Read more at Bryan's blog at http://codeswamp.com.
He also mentioned after his talk, CQRS - a new concept to me - Command Query Responsibility Segregation. A new way to look at architecting your application. Check it out at
http://abdullin.com/cqrs/.