Joe Armstrong, the Main Man behind Erlang, shows how to write an FTP client in Erlang in a couple of lines of code. Some of my own points:

• People on his blog who comment that “what operating system comes without an FTP server?” are totally missing the point, which is that Erlang makes it easy to write network programs. How many lines of code do you think it would have taken to do that in C? That file transfer program he wrote is less than half a dozen lines.

• Yes, it’s not a real FTP client, duh. Erlang does actually come with an FTP module which you can use in your own program, though.