I was sort of curious about Erlang for a while now – just because it was touted a bit as a high performance concurrent programming language. It’s a world of different thinking – the closest I’ve really come into it was some of the concurrent python concepts with Actors and Channels (from Stackless or Kamaelia). But getting a grip on it was always kinda tricky – the docs and such were a bit hard to get into and get any sense of.
Well – that part is all solved with Bob Ippolito’s presentation at C4 last year. You get get his presentation Exploring Erlang on Viddler as one of the many awesome talks that Wolf gathered, encoded, and has made available.
If you’re interested in checking out Erlang, take an hour and put yourself in a quiet room and check out the video. I’d say quiet room not because it’s hard, but because Bob goes over a lot of breadth and depth in a relatively short timeframe, and if you’re distracted, you’ll miss something good.
Rhonabwy 
When I became frustrated with Rails, I wrote my own web application platform, from scratch, in erlang. Took me about 3 months, and while I used Bob’s MochiWeb http front end, I didn’t write an SQL wrapper, I wrote a database engine, and I didn’t import a scripting language, I created my own. The result is better than rails, and about half the development time was learning erlang. One of the hidden benefits of erlang is that it is not just a language- its a platform.
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