I think Twitter is neat. The concept of aggregating brief messages from multiple sources is simple but fun, useful, and technically interesting (well to me anyway). But I have had a couple strange malfunctions in the past couple days. The most disconcerting was that SMS notifications were turned on in the middle of the night unleashing a small torrent of messages on my phone, walking me up.
In a stroke of good luck it turned out to be a good thing because I needed to get up and check the status of some long running processes anyway. But it took me awhile to figure out how to disable the thing (the setting on the home page wasn’t working), and was on the verge of killing off my account. Anyways, I’m disconnecting for a while to go home to Jamestown then onto NYC. I’ll plug back into the Matrix in a couple weeks.
(via christopher baus.net)
If you’ve been following my tweets, you know that after about 6 months of trying to figure out a new side project, I’ve decided to teach myself Erlang.
In short, it will have you digging deep into your CS education to remember languages like Prolog and ML. And after using languages like Python, the syntax is well, ugly. And it certainly doesn’t read like prose, which many developers love about Rails.
But I think there is some genius in there, and the time is right for rethinking concurrency. I spent a lot of time working on a non-blocking proxy server, and IMHO that model of development isn’t going to scale to huge projects, especially in languages like C which have embedded blocking I/O into the brains of developers since day 1.
Prediction: In 10 years all languages will borrow concepts from Erlang. But they may look more like Scala.
(via christopher baus.net)
