Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: Erlang, Day 1

After a long hiatus, I'm finally back to working my way through Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. After finishing up Scala, I'm now on the 5th language, Erlang, though it has taken me quite a bit longer than 5 weeks to get here.

Erlang, Day 1: Thoughts

The first Erlang chapter is just a gentle introduction to the language, so I haven't formed much of an impression of it yet. So far, it looks like a dynamically typed functional programming language with Prolog syntax and pattern matching. Of course, I mostly know of Erlang for its concurrency story, so I'm excited to experiment with that in later chapters.

Erlang, Day 1: Problems

Write a function that uses recursion to return the number of words in a string

	-module(word_count).
	-export([word_count/1]).
	word_count([]) -> 0;
	word_count(Sentence) -> count(Sentence, 1).
	count([], Count) -> Count;
	count([32|Tail], Count) -> count(Tail, Count + 1);
	count([_|Tail], Count) -> count(Tail, Count).

view raw word_count.erl hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Write a function that uses recursion to count to ten

	-module(count_to_ten).
	-export([count_to_ten/0]).
	count_to_ten() -> do_count(0).
	do_count(10) -> 10;
	do_count(Value) -> do_count(Value + 1).

view raw count_to_ten.erl hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Write a function that uses matching to selectively print "success" or "error: message" given input of the form {error, Message} or success

	-module(error_or_success).
	-export([print/1]).
	print(success) -> "success";
	print({error, Message}) -> "error: " ++ Message.

view raw error_or_success.erl hosted with ❤ by GitHub

On to day 2

Check out Erlang, Day 2, for more functional programming goodness.