Erlang questions

Question

We are contemplating using Erlang for our new project that involves some amount of rich web application and data/text analytic at the backed. In that regard, I had the following questions.

1. Is there any coffeescript equivalent of Erlang? Coffeescript itself brings a lot of Erlang good to client-side programming. But wanted to check if there anything other than coffeescript that is nearer to Erlang style/syntax. Of course, we understand that a large part of the core erlang functionality will not be be available in the browser; my question was more from the language structure point of view. Maybe, the fact that JS also supports OO and Erlang is FP might be an hindrance to expressing JavaScript constructs in Erlang.

2. Are there any open-source tools for machine learning in Erlang? Similar to Weka (Java) or R for machine learning and Gate (Java), NLTK (Python) for text mining?

Thanks in advance,

Answer 1

1. As far as I know, similar analogs aren't present. There are some pilot projects, such as erlyjs, but all of them are experimental.
2. You can use external machine learning library via Erlang ports. In my project I use erlport. ErlPort is a Python library which implements Erlang external term format and Erlang port protocol for easier integration of Erlang and Python/NLTK.