defmacro

Description

On an evolutionary scale of innovation from one to ten (one being Bloomberg and Citi Group, eight being Google and Cirque Du Soleil , and ten being the company you couldn't imagine in your wildest dreams), the company I work for is about a three 1 . Being employed by this bastion of ingenuity affords me certain opportunities I can't get elsewhere. For example, every developer gets to interview potential candidates he might end up working with. During our last round of these interviews I met a lot of developers from various backgrounds and with different amounts of experience. Now, our company is a typical software company. We think that developing our, frankly trivial, software requires cream of the crop developers and our upper management continuously boasts about the tremendous amount of talent it has assembled in our office. Of course all our developers are average. We have no Einsteins. There are no visionaries that change the face of the industry. The halls are filled with the burden of monotony rather than the energy of innovation. Our developers are familiar only with mainstream technologies, watered down and sanitized for the general public. Naturally potential candidates that come in for interviews come from a similar breed. Given this state of affairs I wasn't too surprised when candidate after candidate failed to arrive at relatively simple conclusions. Everyone likes to pride themselves as outside the box thinkers but it turns out that very few people are actually capable of thinking even the most innocent thoughts if they didn't hear about them from some authority (either the mainstream collectively referred to as "they" or some person perceived as an expert). In the case I'm about to describe, the difference between me and the people I've interviewed was that I was fortunate enough to stumble upon the right resources supported by a reasonably persistent group of advocates. I can only suggest to try and find the very best and learn from them. I'm in the process of turning this habit into a religious ceremony I try to perform every chance I get. So what was the big question I asked that people couldn't properly handle? It was actually pretty simple. "Please describe some of the challenges you've encountered while working with multithreaded software". That's it. Every single time I uttered this phrase I received the same answer: "Deadlocks and race conditions". It was always a dead end from there. I tried to lead people, gave suggestions, gave them the answer straight out. All I got was weird looks. The following is a one act play that pretty much sums up where my question went every single time. I never got the chance to explain in detail what exactly I meant. There were many other things to get to in the half hour we were allotted for the interview. I limited myself to suggesting the candidate look up Erlang and moved on. This article is my belated attempt to explain Erlang Style Concurrency. Better late than never. It is said that the low hanging fruit is picked early. The field of Computer Science is consistent with this saying.

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