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Show HN: Visual flow-based programming for Erlang, inspired by Node-RED

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199 points Towaway69 | 5 comments | 16 May 25 14:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.768s | source

Hi There,

Erlang-RED has been my project for the last couple of months and I would love to get some feedback from the HN community.

The idea is to take advantage of Erlangs message passing and low overhead processes to have true concurrency in Node-RED flows. Plus also to bring low-code visual flow-based programming to Erlang.

1. bn-l ◴[16 May 25 15:40 UTC] No.44006768[source]▶
Can someone recommend an Erlang course / book?
replies(2): >>44006864 #>>44008644 #
2. Towaway69 ◴[16 May 25 15:48 UTC] No.44006864[source]▶
I keep running into learn you some erlang[1] which seems to be a good online resource. The author of which also wrote the "Erlang in Anger"[2] book.

Then there is the BEAM book[3] which provides an deep dive into Erlang and the BEAM virtual machine.

I'm not the best person to ask since I'm only starting out on Erlang! I much prefer to code visually :)

[1] https://learnyousomeerlang.com [2] https://www.heroku.com/blog/erlang-in-anger/ [3] https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/

replies(1): >>44009698 #
3. randito ◴[16 May 25 18:44 UTC] No.44008644[source]▶
You may want to consider Elixir instead. It has an easier syntax and is (don't quote me on this) equivalent in function and purpose with Erlang. Plus you get lots of other goodies like LiveView (notebooks) and a good web stack (Phoenix).
replies(1): >>44009551 #
4. Towaway69 ◴[16 May 25 20:31 UTC] No.44009551[source]▶
I prefer Erlang because it makes the uniqueness of its paradigm clear. Tail recursion, function matching and, bang, everything is a message!

Elixir makes everything seem like Ruby code and many of those Erlang concepts are hidden away, which is also ok but also takes much away.

My aim with ErlangRED is that both are supported, there is a repository for Elixir code[1] that is included in ErlangRED - so I don't take sides, rather I would like to take advantage of both paradigms.

[1] https://github.com/gorenje/erlang-red-elixir-helpers

5. bn-l ◴[16 May 25 20:47 UTC] No.44009698[source]▶
Thanks for the suggestions! I looked at "learn you some erlang" and I like the style and humor of it.