I’ve recently started dabbling with Erlang and one of the things that I still have to fully grok is OTP. The Open Telecom Platform (OTP) is, allegedly, one of the strongest selling points of Erlang as it provides you with a structure to create fault tolerant, highly available applications … for free. Go figure.
In the introduction to a new series of Erlang/OTP articles for the beginner, Mitchell introduces some basic concepts and makes us a promise: he will hold our hands trough the creation of an OTP banking application. Nice.
I will definitely follow this series of articles and perhaps so should you (if you’re interested in the Erlang/OTP world that is).
Thanks Mitchell!
PS: thanks Harold for pointing me to the article in the first place 
At work I’m trying to get some of my colleagues to give Python a try. Every time I bring up the subject I have to hear things like but there are not brackets … and what’s up with the forced indentation?
Needless to say I always reply that indentation is good as the end result is usually code that is easier to read and that once you have blocks of code defined by their indentation level you don’t need brackets anymore. But no, they will have none of that.
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Last time I checked, the scope of a variable drew the line after which it ceased to exist. For instance, in Java, when you defined a variable in a for loop, the minute the loop was over the variable ceased to exist:
for(int i = 0; i < N; i ++) {
int j = 0;
// do stuff with j
}
// j should cease to exist after here
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