Francesco Allertsen - Issue #94

This simple question has a very complex answer. In fact, it doesn’t even have a single answer, it has an infinite number of them. This article is written by the lead of AWS Lambda, and he knows a thing or two about distributed systems, and this is what he says.

There is a lot to learn, but if you want to learn how to build distributed systems, you can learn a lot from this article, since it tackles the problem from a different point of views.

Another resource that is like in the article is this other blog post, which I didn’t know but it contains a huge amount of readings if you want to learn the fundamentals of distributed systems.

In this presentation, the speaker talks about Erlang, Elixir and mostly about the BEAM virtual machine, which is the virtual machine in common for both languages.

I have used Erlang programs, but have never written any code for the BEAM virtual machine (not even a hello world), but there are a lot of interesting patterns presented in the video that I have heard but never seen in practice. It’s always interesting to learn about more programming languages and the peculiarities of each one. This presentation is a very good introduction to see what the BEAM virtual machine offers out of the box.

I find it interesting when developers decide to change programming language, and why.

This is a quite detailed blog about why a developer decided to move from Python to Go, what he was looking for, what were the advantages and disadvantages of the change and then decided to move to Rust and showing the advantages and disadvantages of that move.

At one point he also mentions Haskell:

This is also interest since he manages to learn both Go and Rust, but not Haskell. I agree that Haskell is not a straight-forward language to jump into, but maybe it would be best for his use case.

This is a bold statement, but it may be true. I have never written any program in Haskell, but I have found more people praising Haskell than the one who thinks it’s a bad programming language.

The biggest problem with Haskell is that everyone agrees that the learning curve is quite steep, but once you can start using it effectively it’s a great language to use.