Lambda the Ultimate

Yep. So cool in fact that I got one of my students to write a Hebrew tutorial on Erlang (and compare its approach to concurrency with other languages, like Java and Ada).

http://www.bluetail.com/~luke/distel/

And oh, Frank, you can always become an editor. If you do, you would be able to post to the home page directly...

The Distel idea is to make an Emacs-based user-interface toolkit for Erlang, and use it to write a lot of programming tools (cross-referencing, debugging, profiling, etc.) The fun part is the approach -- porting Erlang's concurrency model into Emacs Lisp, and implementing the Erlang inter-node distribution protocol, giving "native" communication between concurrent processes in Erlang and in Emacs. Once this is done, it's about as easy to write user interfaces to Erlang programs in Emacs Lisp as it is in Erlang.

It's panned out really well -- a lot of Erlang programmers are using it, a handful of hackers are co-developing it, and it was warmly received at the Erlang conference. I think we're doing a significant new release every month or so.

I hope the paper itself is interesting to LtU readers, as a case-study in, um, something-or-other :-). It assumes basic familiarity Erlang and Elisp. Some important ingredients in implementing Distel, like Trampolined Style, were actually picked up from LtU, so thanks everybody :-)

In the future I'd like to do another version with just straight Emacs-to-Emacs concurrent/distributed programming, standing separate for Erlang. That could also be a useful tool, and more approachable to Emacs hackers. But, for now hacking Distel is more fun :-)

For one thing it is an example of emacs flexibility. Emacs is a classic example of using an embedded language to increase software flexibiliti or modifiability.