Erlang: How to browse ZX/Erlang source files on Windows

Windows is a profoundly annoying development platform for non-MS languages and a fairly rare deployment target so it doesn’t really get much in the way of attention or tooling. The smoothest Erlang experience on Windows so far is running applications via Vapor (a GUI frontend for ZX), but that depends on applications being developed and […]

Building Erlang 23.3.4.3 on Devuan/Debian/Ubuntu

Erlang R24 is out! …but there are, as usual with a version X.0 release, a few rough edges (enough of them around the important-but-annoying WX and OpenGL updates that I’ll be writing another post about that shortly…). In the meantime, R23.3.4.3 is excellent and quite reliable. The steps for building with kerl are nearly identical […]

Erlang: Socket experiments preliminary to writing a web server from scratch

A relative newcomer to networking in Erlang, Dr. Ajay Kumar, has started a self-educational project to create a web server from scratch in Erlang to give himself some first-hand insight into how TCP sockets work in Erlang and how web servers work in general. Web servers are a thing almost everyone has written against or […]

Erlang: Video tutorial HOWTO on installing Erlang and ZX from scratch on Ubuntu Linux

I’m flattered to find that Dr. Kumar made a tutorial video of how to install Erlang and ZX on a fresh Ubuntu system and check that it is working by playing Erltris. It is sort of a video version of previous instructionals and the ZX quickstart docs all in one place. Big thanks to Dr. […]

Erlang: Building a Telnet Chat Server from Scratch Using ZX

A few weeks ago I made a two-part video discussion about building a telnet chat server from scratch using ZX and forgot to post any prose reference to it. (Most people are following my blog RSS, not my (extremely tiny) video channels.) The resulting project is called “Trash Talk” and it has a repo on […]

Erlang: [video] The GUI experience on Windows with ZX and Vapor

I’ve written and spoken a bit about how ZX makes it easy to create, distribute and launch templated GUI projects in Erlang. I also showed how the (still ugly) GUI program launcher Vapor can make it easy for non-technical desktop users to use those programs. So far I’ve been doing my examples on Linux where […]

Erlang: [Video] Creating and running GUI apps with ZX

I had a little bit of time to make a video on how to use ZX to create GUI applications, but not enough time to do any post processing. Hopefully the video demonstrates the basic use case well enough to make the purpose of the tool itself obvious. (The audio isn’t great — hopefully I’ll […]

Erlang: Barnsley’s Fern

A mathematician friend of mine asked me the other day whether we used many techniques from fractal theory in game development. I told her that I didn’t think so, at least not formally. She asked me if I had ever implemented “Barnsley’s Fern” (Wikipedia) and of course I never had. So she asked me to […]

Building Erlang R23.0 on Debian/Ubuntu

As an update to my previous notes on building R22.2, my current notes for building Erlang R23.0 and installing ZX using kerl on a fresh system (Kubuntu 18.04 LTS) are below. The same instructions (or very nearly the same) should work for any Debian or Ubuntu version within a few years of 18.04 LTS. sudo […]