In order to design well, you will need to know your options and their immediate implications. This applies both to large-scale design and to the small details.

The present text is intended to enlighten on the topology of the design spaces — large and small — which are often encountered when developing in the Erlang programming language, and the paradigm that is associated with it.

The target audience is people who already know how to program, and also knows the basics of Erlang, but perhaps not how to apply them to real-life design and implementation problems.

Or put in another way, in terms of the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition: the target reader is at the very least “competent” with respect to designing and programming in one or more programming languages, but is a “novice” or “advanced beginner” with respect to working with Erlang. (Or possibly more experienced than that, but curious about new perspectives on known material.)

For most of the presentation, I’ve chosen a dialogue-based style — inspired in part by the question-and-answer form used in “The Little LISPer,” although not by too much. I hope it will provide a good flow and engage the reader. (The matters discussed are of course of such an immensely interesting nature that you would be spellbound under any circumstances, but form matters as well.)