Email the Author
You can use this page to email Wolfgang Loder about Erlang and Elixir for Imperative Programmers.
About the Book
The printed version of this book and the eBook will be available in November/December 2016 from Apress.
In 2014 I started to develop an application for a Kenyan startup. Basically it is a repository for digital assets and one requirement is to deliver those assets in binary form quickly and reliably, being able to deal with at least hundreds of requests per second.
Since I could decide the architecture and software stack of the solution, I immediately was thinking of Erlang and its libraries and started to evaluate this option. It was not long after that when my eye was also on Elixir, which sits on top of the Elixir virtual machine and has features more palatable for non-functional programmers, although it is a functional programming language itself.
This book gives you a basis for deciding yourself if the effort is viable for your next project. It is partly a tale of my own experience, partly a description of the bigger and more subtle differences between Erlang/Elixir to languages like C++, Java or C#.
About the Author
Wolfgang is programming software since the 1980s. He successfully rejected all calls for management roles and remained hands-on until now.
His journey went from Assembler and C to C++ and Java to C# and F# and JavaScript, from Waterfall To Agile, from Imperative to Declarative and other paradigm changes too many to list and remember.
Most of his career Wolfgang was a contracting 'Enterprise Developer', so the introduction of 'new' languages, frameworks and concepts is very slow in this field. Once he decided to develop his own products he was free of such constraints and ventured into all sorts of paradigms, be it NoSQL or functional and evaluating all the latest ideas, crazy or not. In other words, he has fun developing software.
Wolfgang was born in Vienna, Austria and lives in the UK and Kenya.