advocacy

• Eleven Years of Erlang - maps were added as an alternative to records; strings still aren't separate but the binary syntax for UTF8 strings has gotten down to ~"string" with OTP 27.
• My Road to Erlang - vs. SML, OCaml, Haskell.
  I had a similar experience at a similar time, of getting so frustrated with writing Forth in an excessively hair-shirt manner, that I went looking for the exact opposite of writing code that way.
• On the Perils of Benchmarking Erlang
• Writing Video Games in a Functional Style - an index of performance blog posts
• Purely Functional Retrogames, Part 1

erlang

• A Peek Inside the Erlang Compiler
• Exploring Audio Files with Erlang
• How to Crash Erlang

performance

• A Deeper Look at Tail Recursion in Erlang - simple rule: "If a parameter is passed to another function, unchanged, in exactly the same position it was passed in, then no virtual machine instructions are generated."
• Garbage Collection in Erlang - still good, but read this too
• A Ramble Through Erlang IO Lists (atoms were never added)
• Don't Structure Data All The Way Down

style

• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Erlang's Process Dictionary
• Evolution of an Erlang Style - use I/O with external programs instead of NIFs, prefer list comprehensions and body-recursive list-building
• An Outrageous Port - example of I/O with external programs
• Erlang as a Target for Imperative DSLs - showing efficient Erlang vs. imperative-like use of dict:store/3
• Erlang vs. Unintentionally Purely Functional Python - against minding copies so much

awkward

• Let's Take a Trivial Problem and Make it Hard - tuple freq/1 is still slightly faster than a map-based freq/1, at the cost of much more garbage, and both are comically wasteful and ill-performing when compared to the process dictionary.
• Puzzle Languages - or "escape hatches"
• Revisiting "Purely Functional Retrogames"
• Accidentally Introducing Side Effects into Purely Functional Code

programming

• Starting in the Middle - don't get bogged down in scaffolding
• Turning Your Code Inside Out - how/why to get functional code from stateful code. Sequels:
  1. Purely Functional Photoshop
  2. A Worst Case for Functional Programming?
  3. Reconsidering Functional Programming
• Messy Structs/Classes in an Functional Style
• Functional Programming Doesn't Work (and what to do about it) - "go down the purely functional path as much as possible, but fall back on imperative techniques"
• Would You Bet $100,000,000 on Your Pet Programming Language? - hitting a little close to the home...
• Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program

stale

• Finally: Data Structure Constants in Erlang - HIPE's come and gone, but this code still isn't as inefficient as in the pre-HIPE era
• What to do about Erlang's Records? - answered by maps