www.gamma.net.nz

Hey its simon!

I was thinking about you the other day while looking at these:

http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html#renders

I seem to remember you were doing rendering of 3d fractals quite a while back ... is that right? 

Erlang is used here at work, there is a messaging gateway written in it, I have had to interface to it using http but thats it.

There is also an erlang users group called erlonge that meet in the room next door to me once a month

http://wellington.geek.nz/group/erlounge-erlang-users-group

Some of the guys from perlmongers attend.

I know Andy had a play with it too, he may have a comment.

So erlang is out there in the real world, not sure about the others..

oh xmonad is writen in haskell, i am goignt to get round to switching to it from ion3 rsn.

I know a Haskell zealot that I am sure would be glad to impart his knowledge. can put u in touch...

okay, what's so good about Haskell? and why is it better than ocaml or erlang?

Haskell supposedly has lots of fancy features, the only one of which I can recall is
Software Transactional Memory. Which is supposedly good for solving threading/concurrency problems. Never used it myself tho.

i think most functional programing lean torwards having a better solution for threading than imperative programming.  i think i may continue with ocaml and then see how i like it.

@simon this book is meant to be a good place to start.
real world haskell

thanks mike, looks like a good read.  i will get started with haskell, but i may end up trying all 3 and see which i like best.  i think half of the language is about liking it, and i like python.  i actually like javascript too, it is actually a really cool language to play with.  here is a cool video to show the good parts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2009-November/021750.html

I wonder wheather you have come to a decission which of these three languages you'll give a start. I am still undecided between Erlang and Haskell.

The cool feature of Erlang is it's in-built concurrency I immedaitely felt confortable and it's modern, yet only half-way backed web frameworks. The main downside is lack of packaging infrastructure, TCL/TK still used as main UI library and unfortunately a VM which lags behind the trends in speed. Some nice prjects build on Erlang like couchDB, riak or the nitrogen web framework. Everything seems to be in place for cloud computing.

The pros of Haskell clearly is the brutal performance and packaging mechanism (cabal). There is even a decent IDE (Leksah). I have not yet finished all of Haskells syntax, e.g. I have to understand monads first, but until now Haskell seems to have much more line noise than Erlang. What was the biggest surprise to me was the lack of implmentations of recent technologies, like a RESTful API, a document store database, key/value database or an event driven web framework.

I hung out on #erlang and #haskell. There are about 3x more people on haskell but on erlang. But on Haskell they are talking mostly about the language while on Erlang the main topics are about implementation and getting things done.

Okay, I finally took my finger out.  I'm going for OCaml :).