Subject: Erlang adventures; Erlang image and "success"

[James Hague]

>People need symbols and images to venerate, keywords
>for their resumes and
>bumper-stickers and coffee mugs.

Hmmm...I'd get a coffee mug, were one available.  Ericsson was pretty 
coffee-mug happy when I worked there.  I had two training mugs, a couple 
of AXE mugs, one mug for a project that went by the name of "P5," and one 
for an experimental TCP/IP adjunct to AXE called "Gator."  Surely there 
are already a zillion Erlang mugs out there? :)

>Wouldn't now be a good time to hype Erlang beyond
>recognition?

Does hyping a computer language really work?  Okay, it worked for Java 
but did it ever work prior to that?  If you hang out in forums for 
underdog languages--Smalltalk, Forth, Lisp, Scheme, Eiffel, Modula 3, 
Oberon, Haskell, OCaml--there are frequent cries of "Why don't more 
people realize our language is so cool?"  Seems like the best thing for 
Erlang is to just write great applications with it.

James