Thursday, March 22, 2012

Wither Erlang? Wither GA144? Wither Home Sensor project?

I've mentioned Erlang on this blog before. My last reference was regarding GreenArray's GA144 + arrayForth as sort of a FPGA level Erlang.

 Recently, I've found myself in the midst of using Erlang at work. It has been a number of years since I've played with Erlang. I was first learned the language back in 2002. I knew that there has been a spike of interest starting around 2007/2008 (perhaps due to RabbitMQ and CouchDB?), but that seems to have withered away.

 The Internet's interest in shiny new things is swift and brief. Erlang had it's Internet moment and now we are left with aging (often incomplete) projects and libraries. Oh, the Erlang community still seems vibrant (and releases of Erlang/OTP are flowing), but the Internet hive-mind has moved on (Clojure?). 

As I stretch my Erlang muscles, I am considering giving it a go for the server node of my home sensor/monitoring project. I've been mulling over using the GA144 here, but for practical purposes a Linux based solution may make more sense. While this will slow down my GA144 experimentation (and postings), I don't intend to "abandon" the chip. I am just finding that my home project is at risk of withering unless I get something working. Maybe an Atom based SBC running Linux and Erlang would be a good place to start.

 More later....