Erlang and First-Person Shooters (2011) [pdf]

Since some people were asking on how to get started with Erlang, some time ago this MOOC was posted on HN for an intro to learning Erlang/functional programming.

What I liked about it is that it assumes you have an imperative programming background so it isn't entirely like learning at a very slow pace (which leads me to lose interest): https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/functional-programming-e...

The next course after this is on the concurrency part of Erlang which is also on FutureLearn that I'm currently taking. It has video clips from Joe Armstrong teaching concurrency (one of the creators of the language).

Akka was basically the Scala implementation of Erlang's actor model.

The key differences are, for me, Erlang is easier to reason about (this is mostly how my mind works; Akka it felt like everything was reactive, that nothing is doing any work until it gets a message; Erlang it felt like the opposite, that every process is doing work until it decides it needs a message, and then it can check its mailbox, and optionally block until something ends up in it), and because of its functional nature, things that require special keywords in Akka, just fall out 'for free' in Erlang. For instance, 'become'. 'Become' is just calling another function in Erlang, that has different behavior. Erlang also has more reliability characteritics (not as efficient, but, no stop the world garbage collection, shared nothing, so the only way an exception in one actor can affect another is via an OOM, or specifically hooking up links/monitors such that it causes it to affect the other actor). Akka, however, gives you the speed of the JVM (which -is- better, in pure number cruncing, than Erlang), more libraries (though Erlang is no slouch there, and they all kind of fit the Erlang model), and OOness, if that's your thing.