The last time I got excited about a programming language was around 5 years ago when I started to learn a scripting language called Python. At that point of time, I were looking for a language that is easier to use than Perl. Don’t get me wrong: Perl is still great for throw-away scripting. Its regular-expression is indispensable tool. But to do OO development in perl is simply too painful for me.

To me, Python is ‘Perl done right’. It has the power of Perl, yet more readable and programmable. The use of space to indicate scope is simply a brilliant idea, despite feels a bit odd to begin with. By taking away some individual ‘freedom’ in this regard, it gives the whole community the advantage of uniformity of coding style. This actually makes Python an ideal language for enterprise environment, because, unlike other scripting languages, Python programmers tends to write code in consistent Pythonic style. No more unmaintainable cryptic Perl or Tcl scripts.

Python also introduces the idea of Lambda Function and Closure to me. Without me knowing, I have picked up some functional programming concept!

Functional programming is no alien to me. I have done Miranda in my first year of computer science, but I were not impressed at that time. I simply did not get it then. (Besides, it seemed to me that none got paid for doing FP professionally, so there is even less incentive to master the concepts)

Now, I have come a full cycle. This year I “discovered” the language Erlang. After reading the concepts behind the language design and implementation, I am totally in awe. The impact is as if some mystical figure suddenly showed up and told me the answer of a riddle of which I have searching for an answer for years in wilderness.

So, hopefully in this blog I can share with the public my (hopefully weekly) progress in mastering this new language, erlang, and along the way, my feeling/idea about Erlang, Python and Java. (Hence the title of this blog)