Types and abstractions

Erlang is a dynamically typed programming language; a property that has its pros and cons. It is very easy to write smaller programs in a dynamically typed programming language but ones systems grow larger one will benefit from a static type system where the compiler can help us to find bugs in our code. Erlang is a programming language that is targeting large systems and would benefit from a static type system but there are certain aspects when it come to concurrency and change to running systems that makes it very hard to implement a static type system.

We will discuss how a type system would have made things different by implementing a ray tracer. If everything works as expected you should be able to generate images as the one below.

Read chapter 7 in the course book.

• tracer.pdf

Before the lecture

You should before the lecture have completed a small ray tracer in Erlang following the tutorial below. During the lecture we will discuss different aspects of the program,  how we have worked with data types  and how things could have been different in another programming language.

• tutorial will be added