More Erlang

Over on Lambda the Ultimate a growing thread on concurrency, Erlang, Lisp, and such. The thread centers around another successul use of Erlang in the real world, the online game "Vendetta Online"...

The new erlang based system is now in production. For those who haven't been following, we ran into problems with our existing Lisp-based system (named "Deliverator") which handles high-level AI behaviour.. large groups of NPCs, large battles and the like. Over the last couple of months, we've been in the process of migrating to a much more scalable architecture (named "Kourier") based on Erlang, an elegant distributed-programming platform.

Concurrently, a new book by Joe Armstrong is in the works (available now as a beta PDF) published by Pragmatic Programmers. The table of contents looks good. I bought the PDF but who knows when I'll have time to dig into it. There is an older book online that's pretty good, but somewhat out of date, "Erlang in Real Time".

The original book, "Concurrent Programming in Erlang", is a smaller effort, fine for beginning, but the two mentioned above get into more details required for building complete systems.