posted 13 years ago
You can of course call me biased, but yes, I think Erlang is very easy to learn. I have seen time and time again how people with no previous knowledge of functional programming (or even much experience of programming at all) have picked it up in just a few days, and how experienced programmers with a background in other languages have been able to start producing real, useful code in less than a week, writing distributed programs that would be much more complicated to do in C, Java, Python, or similar. Erlang was not created as an academic, difficult language - it was made for writing programs that work, and that are maintainable and readable and easy to debug.
Erlang lowers the barrier to experimenting with distribution, and allows you to make rapid prototypes that usually turn out to be good enough that you can start using them for real almost right away. But don't just listen to what I'm saying - try it out for yourself and see. It's a good idea to think of some real problem that you'd like to play with.
Of course, to become really good at designing systems in Erlang takes time, like everything else, but the initial learning curve from zero to being productive is very gentle and surprisingly short.
