Garrett Smith

This is by Garrett Smith http://gar1t.com Pretty much all his talks and videos are great. He is a good speaker. Watch even just for the fun on if it. (BTW he is author of "MongoDB is Webscale" video as well as "Erlang II : The Movie"). As far as the talk is concerned (TL;DR) "Scalable doesn't mean anything anymore, it is too ambiguous of a term. Just replace it with another equally useful word -- Awesome".

I agree with Dave on the pattern matching in function heads, at least from your description. Garrett Smith’s blog post on tiny functions[0] has heavily influence my Erlang. [0]: http://www.gar1t.com/blog/solving-embarrassingly-obvious-problems-in-e…

This post describes a process of decomposing code into very simple functions: http://www.gar1t.com/blog/solving-embarrassingly-obvious-problems-in-e… This results in functions which are, I feel, a bit too small for comfort. On the other hand, Erlang's pattern matching on function parameters has an effect similar to Eiffel design by contract. It has the potential to reduce the number of tests that need to be written (many of which are often very short functions). Ideomatic Erlang/Elixir code tends toward smaller functions and pattern matching on multiple function heads instead of if/then/else logic.

Also known as Outlaw Techno Psychobitch in Erlang community, per [0], as popularized by the creator of the famous "MongoDB is Web Scale". Context [1]. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ [1] - http://www.gar1t.com/blog/otp.html

What is wrong with Outlaw Techno Psychobitch [1] ? [1] http://www.gar1t.com/blog/erlang-the-movie-ii-the-sequel.html

Or Outlaw Techno Psychobitch http://www.gar1t.com/blog/erlang-the-movie-ii-the-sequel.html

"Making of" -> http://www.gar1t.com/blog/otp.html

It takes a lot of chutzpah for Larry Wall to say anything critical about Lisp syntax. Larry Wall. Come on. I'm not the author of the comment above, but I think Erlang's syntax is effective in that it strongly emphasizes computation by pattern matching. If you write very imperative code in it (as people tend to, coming from Ruby or what have you), yes, it will look gnarly. Good Erlang code looks qualitatively different. There are pretty good examples of hairy, imperative Erlang code being untangled in this blog post: http://gar1t.com/blog/2012/06/10/solving-embarrassingly-obvious-proble… The . , ; thing is a bit of a hack, admittedly -- I suspect that comes from using Prolog's read function to do parsing for the original versions of Erlang (which was a Prolog DSL), and reading every clause of a function definition at the same time. Prolog ends every top-level clause with a period, not "; ; ; ; .". (Not sure, but a strong hunch, supported by Erlang's history.) I got used to it pretty quickly, though.