Saturday, September 01, 2007
 

Holiday Reading

For the last 2.5 weeks I had been in Norway on holidays. I did not take my notebook, so I had to take a couple of books so I wouldn't disconnect from the software world :-) Here's what I read:

I started with Programming Erlang. I was curious to understand the buzz around this language in the context of concurrent systems. And I must say it looks like a very interesting language indeed. I am not sure I would agree with Ralph Johnson who says that Erlang could be the next Java, but it sure is an interesting approach to concurrency. Erlang is also interesting from a functional-language point of view.

Then I read Dierk König's Groovy in Action book. Now, this is a must-read for everybody: great topic (Groovy is really cool!), superbly written, many insights into programming language design in general. And wrt to Groovy: It really feels like this is the future of Java! Why would anybody want to use Java now that Groovy's around?

I then concluded with Beautiful Code, which, since it is an edited book, can't be judged as a whole. There are good, better and not-so-good chapters in it. I am still reading it now, and I am not sure I would recommend it wholeheartedly.

Anyway: I had something to do during the (few) rainy days in Norway, and I learned something along the way.
 
Comments:
It would be nice to listen to an interview with some Erlang guru at SE Radio! :)
 
Yes, indeed :-)

(we're working on that!)

Markus
 
I'm taking the POSA4 and 5 to our two week baltic sea vaction :) Glad you reminded me of the books in the SE-radio episode. See you at JAOO.

Michael
 
What do you think about the beauty of Erlang or the absence of it?

At least in comparison to Ruby it doesn't seem to talk to me ;-)

But I also just read the book, so the jury might still be out on this.

The most "beautiful" samples I've seen so far I found on Sam Ruby's site.
 
Well, I have to say I don't necessarily think it is beautiful. I think the way it uses pattern matchin is really elegant - and the concurrency model is also conceptually nice and simple.

Wrt to Ruby: all the meta stuff in Ruby also does not win a beauty contest, does it?

Markus
 
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