Learning Erlang

Let me tell you how Learing is. By this, I mean coding. The blog that you are about to read is written towards people who have mildly thought about coding. It’s not that hard, and you can get yourself into it fairly easy and it pays well. A lot of people might stop because of the learning curve, but you really just have to progress at you own rate. If you’re getting stuck, and this is an actual quote from Joe Armstrong,

If a process fails, what should it do? Well, it should try to do something simpler.

I love that quote. Learning is very much the same way. I’m taking some of my time to write this, but hopefully it benefits all the readers more than my small amount of time. If you enjoy the article, please let me know.

The Learning Process

This is how I learn. Some learn by listening, reading or doing, but all actually progress towards doing. I learn by doing all 3 at the same time.

I am learning Erlang. I know nothing about Erlang. I’m terrible at it. I am on page 67 of Joe Simpson’s great book “Programming Erlang - 2nd Edition”.

Okay, well let’s start at the max code that I can think of. Let’s code in Intellij and write a whole program. Okay, here’s how far I got. I was going to write a program about me and some other objects on a Sunday, and have them interact. I started a aaron.erl module, that sunday.erl module was supposed to spawn. Here’s the first code I wrote:

Then I progressed to the colsole, I wasn’t ready for a file. Doing c(module_name). each time to compile changes for Erlang files is tough.

So, I went to the console. Here’s some code I next wrote:

Then I next tried codewars. They didn’t have a lot of Erlang. I tried the Erlang 7kyu 7x7 Skyscrapers Problem, I could probably solve this in Python. Erlang, I didn’t stand a chance!

Conclusion

That’s what learning is.

It’s try, succeed or fail, try again.

If you enjoy something, then sometimes losing is the next best thing to winning. So, if you win or lose, you enjoy it and keep going, and eventually find out how to win because winning is better than losing!

If you start to not enjoy it. Then pivot your learning towards a direction that you like more, and keep learning.