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Yariv's Blog

Adventures in Open Source Erlang

Last week, I attended the Numenta workshop. I didn’t know much about Numenta before I went. My friend’s excitement about the technology Numenta is building piqued my curiosity, so I decided to check it out. It seemed that almost everyone else in the conference had read Jeff Hawkins’s On Intelligence and at least experimented with Numeta’s tools, so I felt like a real n00b. I’m happy I went, though, because I learned about some interesting ideas and technologies.

Jeff Hawkins, Numenta’s founder, has been fascinated with the workings of the brain throughout his career, but only two decades into it, after he founded Palm and Handspring, was he able to devote his efforts to artificial intelligence. In On Intelligence, Hawkins discusses his theories on the brain’s functions in detail. Numenta, a company he founded with Dileep George and Donna Dubinsky, aims to put these ideas to work in commercial and research applications.

Numenta is a platform company. The platform they develop is NuPIC (Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing), a software toolkit essentially for building pattern classifiers. The fundamental concept behind NuPIC is called HTM (Hierarchical Temporal Memory). It postulates that the cortex learns to recognize patterns using a combination of two basic algo

Twoorl Goes MultilingualJune 28

Since its launch, Twoorl users have helped translate it to Spanish, German, French, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian) and Russian. This is an awesome contribution from the Twoorl community. Big thanks to everyone who contributed a translation!

If you’re fluent in a language that Twoorl hasn’t been translated into and you’d like to contribute a translation for it, obtain the file twoorl_eng.erl, translate the english strings, and email me the modified file. (Please make sure the file is encoded in UTF-8.) If you’re familiar with Git, you can also clone the repository, make the changes, and send me a message through GitHub to pull your updates. Thanks in advance!

Announcing Twoorl: an open source ErlyWeb-based Twitter cloneMay 29

With the recent brouhaha over Twitter’s scalability problems, I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to write a Twitter clone in Erlang?

Last weekend was cold and rainy here in Palo Alto, so I sat down and hacked one, and thus Twoorl was born. It took me one full day plus a couple of evenings. The codebase is about 1700 lines (including comments). You can get it at http://code.google.com/p/twoorl

Note: you need the trunk version of ErlyWeb to make it work (when released, it will be the 0.7.1 version).

Many people written about Twitter’s scalability problems and how to solve them. Some have blamed Rails (TechCrunch is among them), whereas others, including Blaine Cook, Twitter’s Architect, have convincingly argued that you can scale a webapp written in any language/framework if you’ve figured out how to Just Add More Servers to handle the growing traffic. Eran Hammer-Lahav wrote some of the most insightful articles on the subject,

Erlang vs. ScalaMay 19

In my time wasting activities on geeky social news sites, I’ve been seeing more and more articles about Scala. The main reasons I became interested in Scala are 1) Scala is an OO/FP hybrid, and I think that any attempt to introduce more FP concepts into the OO world is a good thing and 2) Scala’s Actors library is heavily influenced by Erlang, and Scala is sometimes mentioned in the same context as Erlang as a great language for building scalable concurrent applications.

A few times, I’ve seen the following take on the relative mertis of Scala and Erlang: Erlang is great for concurrent programming and it has a great track record in its niche, but it’s unlikely to become mainstream because it’s foreign and it doesn’t have as many libraries as Java. Scala, on the hand, has the best of both worlds. Its has functional semantics, its Actors library provides Erlang style concurrency, and it runs on the JVM and it has access to all the Java libraries. This combination makes Scala it a better choice for building concurrent applications, especially for companies that are invested in Java.

I haven’t coded in Scala, but I did a good amount of research on it and it looks like a great language. Some of the best programmers I know rave about it. I think that Scala can be a great replacement for Java. Function objects, type inference, mixins and pattern matching are all great language features that Scala has and that are sorely missing from Java.

Althou

Is Facebook running one of the world’s biggest Erlang clusters?May 15

I just read on the Facebook engineering blog this post describing how Facebook used Erlang to scale Facebook Chat to 70 million active users overnight. WOW.

This announcement should remove any doubts that Erlang is *the* platform for building scalable realtime (aka Comet) applications.