I've been doing some thinking about Cyber Renaissance and the system management problems the company is trying to solve. It's still an early stage startup and we're exploring some ideas about using autonomic clusters of computers to do useful work. This is an interesting problem domain, and may prove to be profitable.

We're looking at using a functional programming language such as Erlang or Haskell to implement this since they promise improved reliability and effective use of the multi-core processors that are now mainstream. As we develop our ideas, we'll experiment with the functional programming paradigm to see how well it fits both the problem domain and our brains.

Cyber Renaissance is a new startup dedicated to the creation of an open source Network Management System using Erlang. I've joined the forum to begin kicking around ideas with the founder.

PylonsHQ has been remodeled using CouchDB as the database. The most interesting Python web framework meets the most interesting non-relational database. It'll be interesting to see how this works out.

Apache CouchDB has just hatched from the Apache incubator. CouchDb is a distributed, fault tolerant, semi-structured database designed to scale both up and out. The engine is written in Erlang for robust concurrency. The API is RESTful HTTP. Data structures are JSON. It's not relational, though relations and schema could be built upon it. JavaScript is the default scripting language, though Python, Ruby, and others have bindings.

CouchDB looks very promising for Web 2.0 applications. A complete web app can be built with JavaScript and CouchDB. I've installed version 0.9 from svn and begun playing with it a bit. Though still alpha, installation was fairly straightforward on Fedora 9 and it passes the unit tests. I'll dive deeper in the coming days.

When I upgraded my Thinkpad to Fedora 9, I saw that Erlang version R12B was in the distribution, so I decided to install it. I first looked at Erlang about 10 years ago and found it interesting, but didn't have a specific use for it and have mostly been using Python in the intervening period because it's "good enough" and has very nice syntax.

Erlang is a functional language for building reliable, concurrent, distributed systems. It's declarative rather than imperative, with a syntax somewhat like Prolog. This takes a little getting used to, but isn't a significant barrier. With the rise of inexpensive multicore processors and ubiquitous networked computing, Erlang is becoming more compelling and it's time to revisit it.