When programming Erlang, you should think like you are writing an English essay. In Erlang, functions are not very different to what a traditional programming language offers, but they are written very differently in Erlang. To declare a function in the Erlang Repl, you will have to use the fun keyword. Name = fun(X) -> X. The above code will store the the declaration of a function called Name and would receive an argument called X....
If you come from a conventional programming language background, the way Erlang handles assignment is expected to look wonky, but it is not. There is nothing like an assignment in Erlang programming language; there is a different approach to accessing values in memory, which is the pattern-matching operations. With Java, PHP, Python, C, C++, and likes, the = symbol implies take the values from the right, and store it into the memory, then give me the reference of the location in memory and store it in the expression at the left....
If you have worked with other languages like JavaScript, Java, Python etc, you would be surprised by what Erlang understands as variable. In Erlang, variables starts with uppercase letter, thus, C, X, Ape, Ant are all valid identifiers for Erlang variables. Variables can not start with lowercase letter or begin with a number. Erlang variables can include can alphanumeric characters, an underscore and @ symbol. X = 1. %% Valid y = 2....
If you have used WhatsApp or Facebook Chat, then you have one way or the other interacted with an Erlang-backed system. Erlang is a language created for the telecommunication industry by Jor Armstrong, Robert Virding, and Mike Williams in 1986. It was recorded that Jor Armstrong claimed he was provided a library and did not know what to do with it, then they taught him to solve the reliability and concurrent problem of the telecommunication industry, and that gave birth to Erlang....