Jim Larson
SimpleD8 replication architect and Erlang programmer
Google
Jim Larson is a software engineer at Google where he works on large
scale storage systems. He has worked with Erlang for commercial
products and services off and on since 1999. He was the architect of
the replication engine of the Amazon SimpleDB Web service at
Amazon.com. He previously worked at Sendmail Inc. and the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory. He has a B.A. in Mathematics from St. Olaf
College, an M.S. in Mathematics from Claremont Graduate University, and
an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Oregon.
Jim Larson is Giving the Following Talks
Using Erlang to Solve Concurrent Problems
No product specification would ever ask us to make a GUI freeze during a DNS lookup, increase the latency of server requests, or leave needed processing hardware sit idle. Yet even software delivered by well-funded teams of professionals commits these offences - all from a hesitance to tackle the problems of concurrency. But with conventional languages and environments, concurrent programming is difficult and dangerous.
Erlang is promoted as a "concurrency-oriented language". Its core
language provides a minimal set of concurrency primitives, providing a
foundation for the full-featured support in the OTP library. But
equally important is Erlang's intentional omission of dangerous
features, which allow even imperfect programs to run safely and
securely with high availability.
This talk introduces the Erlang way of concurrency, from basic
language primitives to architectural patterns, and how to apply them to
designing, programming, testing, debugging, and running your programs.
We'll also discuss performance and distribution.