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Simple JSON parsing in Erlang

I've been playing around with Erlang. It's an interesting programming language - it forces you to think somewhat differently about how to solve problems. It's all about pattern matching and recursion, so it takes bit getting used to before you can follow the flow in an Erlang program. Back in college I did some projects with Prolog so some of the concepts in Erlang were vaguely familiar.

Supposedly, Erlang's main strength is support for concurrency. I haven't gotten that far in my experiments but wanted to start somewhere with writing actual code. OTP - the Erlang standard library doesn't have support for JSON so I wanted to see if I could parse a simple JSON representation into a dictionary object.

The code is available on Github: https://github.com/snorristurluson/erl-simple-json

This is still very much a work in progress, but the parse_simple_json/1 now handles a string like {"ExpiresOn":"2017-09-28T15:19:13", "Scopes":"myScope", "TokenType":"Service", "ApplicationID":42, "ClientIdentifier":"myApp", "IntellectualProperty":"myIP"} returning a dictionary with the appropriate keys and values.

Erlang code is fairly compact. This is a plus when your arm is broken and typing speed is severely impacted.

Fun stuff!
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