C4[1]: Exploring Erlang

I finally watched the C4[1] talk Exploring Erlang (video, slides) by Bob Ippolito.  It's a basic introduction to Erlang and worth watching if you've never seen the language and have only heard a little about it.  He goes through several examples.  Alex Payne wrote a nice summary of the talk.

He did a performance comparison of an Erlang web server to Apache.  I believe the performance claims, but his comparison unfortunately is apples to oranges and isn't fair.  Come to think of it, few benchmark comparisons are.

The questions following the talk were a little bit interesting.  Someone asked if Erlang was suitable for desktop applications, e.g., using it to back a Cocoa application.  The answer, predictably, was no.  Alex Payne asked about the adoption rate at Ippolito's company, Mochi Media, since he had trouble getting people to consider Erlang at Twitter.  If I recall correctly, Ippolito said there are eight engineers at his company, four are using it currently, and all new projects are using Erlang (as opposed to Python). 

Bob spent some time talking about process trees and structuring collections of processes to be fault tolerant, but he didn't get to specific patterns.  What's the right way to break down problems?  Nobody pushed him on that in the questions.

I don't know what to say about the performance.  Folks say Erlang is fast.  These are the same folks using Python, Ruby, and Perl.  Coming from Chez Scheme, I suspect the performance is nothing special, because I know that Chris and Bob's Erlang embedding in Chez is blistering fast.