Francesco Cesarini -  is the founder and Technical Director of Erlang Solutions. He has used Erlang on a daily basis for almost 15 years, starting as an intern at Ericsson’s computer science laboratory, the birthplace of Erlang. He moved on to Ericsson’s Erlang training and consulting arm working on the first release of OTP, applying it to turnkey solutions and flagship telecommunications applications. In 1999, soon after Erlang was released as open source, he founded Erlang Solutions, who have become the world leaders in Erlang based consulting, contracting, training and systems development. Francesco has worked in major Erlang based projects both within and outside Ericsson, and as Technical Director, is currently leading the development and consulting teams at Erlang Solutions. He is also the co-author of Practical Erlang Programming, a book published by O’Reilly. Cesarini gives insights into Erlang’s strong suits exclusively for The Bitsource’s readers, and gives a preview into the upcoming Erlang Factory Conference in London, which has been ongoing since 2008 to complement the yearly Erlang user Conference in Sweden.

Q: What would you tell other readers who might not know much about Erlang about the language?

Cesarini: There seems to be a conception that Erlang is good at developing telecoms application. While this is true, but you need to look further than that. What are the characteristics of telecom applications? They are distributed, massively concurrent, soft real time systems with requirements on high availability. The same requirements exist for messaging systems (Instant Messaging, MMS, SMS, Pub/Sub), banking systems, cloud computing infrastructure, e-commerce and web back-ends.
If you are looking into developing server-side software which is not telecom related, you should have a look at how companies such as E*Trade, Yahoo!, Github and Facebook, to mention but a few, have used it.

Q: As a functional programming language, what are Erlang’s strong suits?

Cesarini: The first point of call is Erlang’s concurrency model. The virtual machine is heavily optimised for light weight concurrency, making process creation and message passing very cheap and effective. To quote Simon Peyton Jones, future concurrent languages will be functional, even if they might be called something different. It has a very simple, but powerful error handling mechanism which allows processes to monitor each other, isolate failures and quickly recover without affecting other parts of the system. Software upgrades during runtime means no downtime when uploading patches or changing features. And as Erlang is declarative in nature, constructs such as pattern matching, bit syntax and higher order functions allow programmers to express themselves with a fraction of the code needed in other
mainstream languages such as C++ and Java.

Q: What exciting new things will be upcoming at the Erlang Factory London 2010?

Cesarini: Highlights in London this year will include keynotes from Robert Virding, Joe Armstrong and Martin Odersky. But if you look at the list of confirmed speakers, I really don’t know where to start. From the NoSQL movement, Justin Sheehy, from Basho Technologies will be presenting Riak, while Jan Lenhard will be presenting the latest features in CouchDB. Yahoo! will be sharing their experiences on how to get Erlang into large organisations, while smaller startups will let us in on many of their success stories. Research and hobby projects are just as important, with the latest news from Erjang, porting Erlang to the JVM, Clone detection with Wrangler or model checking using McErlang.
We will also have lots of case studies on how Erlang is being used as a development tool or to power their computing infrastructure. New for this year, we are planning a track on Erlang in embedded devices. But these are just the talks. Based on delegate and speaker feedback, their highlight is the ability to network, exchange experiences and meet other Erlang enthusiasts.

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Erlang Official Web Site

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