Chicago Erlang Users - August 2012

Joxa - A Full Featured Lisp on the Erlang VM

Eric Merrit

The Erlang virtual machine is unique in its ability to provide fine grained, highly concurrent process isolation. But did you know that it supports syntax other than Erlang itself?

In this talk, Eric Merrit -- co-author of Erlang and OTP In Action -- will introduce Joxa, a full featured Lisp running on the Erlang virtual machine. He'll explain the approach of creating a new language for the Erlang VM and demonstrate how Lisp can be used to write remarkably elegant and expressive code. And of course it's all massively concurrent and fault tolerant!

If you're new to Erlang, Lisp, language design, fault tolerant systems -- heck, if you're new to software -- this is a remarkable opportunity to witness up close the birth of a new language! **

** No flash photography during the birth

Solving Embarrassingly Obvious Problems In Erlang

Garrett Smith

In Garrett's now world famous blog post **, Solving Embarrassingly Obvious Problems In Erlang (http://gar1t.com/blog/2012/06/10/solving-embarrassingly-obvious-problems-in-erlang/), he illustrates how well-suited Erlang is for "rigorous problem solving" -- also known as "software development". He uses a simple process of functional decomposition to reduce code to a series of trivial, embarrassingly obvious functions that all fit together to solve a complex problem.

In this segment, Garrett will facilitate a collaborative exercise of taking real-life production code, which sucks, and refactoring it until it's totally awesome.

If you've ever looking at Erlang syntax and concluded that it's the ugliest, worst hideous mess of a language ever invented, this talk might possibly change your mind. And even if it doesn't you may get some ideas for refactoring your own code, in any language.

** Over 150 views!