Exploring Programming Languages— Erlang

Generated by Google’s Gemini

Let’s continue our exploration of programming languages, with a language that while old has gain more traction in recent years.

Erlang has been amongst us for 38 years already, as it was first published on 1986.

The first I learned Erlang was around 2014, and I learned it by reading Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good! a must read book and my first introduction to Functional Programming.

Ok, let’s jump into our main topic, which is creating an LED Numbers application.

The application should work like this, we input 1977 and it returns:

LED Numbers output

Now, keep in mind that we want to show this to newcomers to Erlang not to seasoned developers. Also, keep in mind that being a Functional programming language, Erlang’s way of doing things is not the easiest to grasp.

Something to keep in mind, is that in Erlang, every command ends with a period.

As with other programming languages, we want to use a Dict or Dictionary to hold the components of our LED number.

Leds = #{0 => {" _  ","| | ","|_| "},
         1 => {"  ","| ","| "},
         2 => {" _…