Erlang: Toying with Erlang

I'm really interested in distributed computing and concurrency right now. Given that I've been playing with Haskell so much, I thought I'd give Erlang a try since it's all about distributed computing, concurrency, and scalability.

I must admit that it already seems easier for me to read than Haskell. I'm not sure why. As I mentioned before, I do like Erlang-style concurrency, since strangely enough, that's how I had always thought things should work.

I'm fascinated by Mnesia, Erlang's distributed database. Unfortunately, according to this:

Mnesia is not perfect, of course, and its biggest downside at the moment is that its disc storage engine isn't suited for storing large volumes of data (Mnesia was designed for soft real-time applications where the data is stored mostly in RAM), but I hope this will be resolved in the not-too-distant future.

This is a major downer for me because I'm currently interested in terabyte-sized data sets. Nor is there a suitable MySQL driver.

Yaws is the Web application framework for Erlang. I can't say whether it's good or bad, but as a matter of taste, ever since I used Apache's Element Construction Set back in the day, I've had a particular dislike for generating HTML using programming language syntax as is done in Yaws:

%% the little status field in the upper left corner
head_status(User) ->
    T = 
        {ehtml, 
         {table, [],
          {tr, [],
           [{td, [{width, "30%"}],
             {table, [ {border, "1"}, {bgcolor, beige},{bordercolor, black}],
              [{tr, [], {td, [], pb("User: ~s", [User])}}
              ]}
             },
            {td, [{align, right}], {img, [{src, "junk.jpg"}  
                                         ]}}
           ]
          }
         }
        }.

Yuck :(

Nonetheless, Erlang has already taught me new ways of thinking about distributed computing. I guess I'm wondering if there's anything I can't do the Erlang way in Python. Afterall, consider Candigram, which is an implementation of Erlang concurrency primitives in Python; although Candigram itself doesn't provide microthreads like Erlang. That reminds me, I'm still looking for an answer to my post Limitations of Coroutines via Enhanced Generators.

And if you're wondering--no, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about! I've only been looking at this stuff for like two days! I guess I should just shut up and go back to reading Erlang for C, C++ and Java Programmers. Hmm, I wonder where the tutorial for Python programmers is ;)