[shepardrtc]

You certainly can do that. In fact, I believe I saw an example of that in a tutorial somewhere talking about what Erlang/Elixir would be good for (I include Elixir because its the same VM controlling processes underneath, but a "nicer" syntax on top). Now, would it be the best language for that? Depends. If you're looking just for speed and massive computations, then no. In the end, C++ pretty much rules everything in that regard (except for maybe Fortran in some instances). But, I would say that it might be more fun to set it up in Erlang/Elixir. And you could pretty easily expand the whole thing just by adding more processors and simply telling it to spawn more processes (the Erlang VM is pretty awesome). I would almost say that an Erlang version of it would feel more life-like. You could probably experiment with it on the fly more easily, too. Kill off a process here or there and see what happens, etc.

[rz2k]

I actually started going through Programming Elixir this past week because I was thinking it would eventually be a fun way to explore models through ad hoc substitution of rules and exogenous conditions. There are a lot of models available in NetLogo, but it doesn't look like it would be very powerful in terms of running larger scale simulations, and the scope of the language's usefulness is pretty limited compared to that of a general purpose language.

While I have been using C++/Rcpp to extend R as an occasional time saver (for analysis rather than simulations), it's only been little snippets written badly.

Anyway, since its so easy to come up with a too long list of technologies to learn, then only scratch the surface, hearing that Erlang/Elixir isn't the completely wrong tool is helpful.

[shepardrtc]

As an example, here's the game of life written in Elixir:

https://github.com/spikegrobstein/elixir-conway

How much better that is than a C++ version, I don't know. But if you want to get better at C++ and give it a try, forget what you know and read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Principles-Practice-Using-...