Joe Armstrong - Erlang and other stuff Home Archive Resources Installing Links Source 01 Feb 2014 Yesterday release candidate 1 of version R17 of Erlang was released. This was a major event. Version R17 has some changes to Erlang that significantly improve the language. These are the biggest changes since the introduction of higher order functions and list comprehensions. Erlang now has maps and named arguments in funs. We’ve been talking about maps for over twelve years, but now they are here to stay. Why the long wait? - we wanted maps to be a replacement for records and to be as efficient as records, and its not blindingly obvious how to do so. In the remainder of this article I’ll explain some of the new features in Erlang version R17. Records are dead - long live maps ! Maps are associative collections of key-value pairs. In Perl and Ruby they are called...