Tomorrow Tim and I start a month-long Erlang class from Erlang Solutions The class notes say you should come with Erlang installed but the easy option for installing (brew install erlang) would have given me R14 (and R16 is just about out) and the official instructions on how to install from source were a little off putting. I really don’t want to use MacPorts if I don’t have to. We use it at work and it’s dependency management is a bit messy so you end up installing the entire universe to get the one tool you want.

Fortunately the Erlang Solutions folks have a DMG installer for Erlang R16A at: https://www.erlang-solutions.com/downloads/download-erlang-otp. It says it is compiled for Snow Leopard (10.6.8) but the DMG installer ran fine and the little bit of playing around I did in the Erlang shell seems to work.

I was very pleased that the Getting Started docs mentioned that Erlang ships with a set of tools - including an Erlang mode for Emacs. The binary intaller I used placed the lib files in /usr/local/lib/erlang/ rather than /usr/local/otp but with that small change, I now have emacs with Erlang support!!

Can’t wait for class to start!