Alexander Williams

In an earlier post, I created a concurrent Erlang version of the "99 Bottles of Beer" beer song. In that post, I mentioned that I was reading a beta copy of Joe Armstrong's new book Programming Erlang - Software for a Concurrent World. Well, in that book, Joe creates a simplistic version of MapReduce in Erlang. (I described MapReduce in my earlier post on "Concurrent/Parallel Programming - The Next Generation"). So, I decided to implement the beer song using Joe's Erlang version of MapReduce. (Note: Although you have to pay for a copy of Joe's book, the source code from the book is freely downloadable. If you want to try out my program below, you will need the "phofs.erl" file from that code archive.)