Happy New Year and continued Erlang Hacking

[Ulf Wiger]

Fellow Erlangers,

The other day, I checked the erlang.org statistics, and
could observe that Erlang/OTP R9B has been downloaded nearly
10,000 times already. November 2002 seems to have been the
most active month ever. This is good news indeed. (:

This is my 10th Erlang anniversary. I came across Erlang at
the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1992, as
Bjarne Däcker and Robert Virding taught "Computers in
Telephony Systems" there. It was love (for Erlang) at first
sight, and I`ve been lucky enough to have been able to
devote most of my time at work to Erlang since then (at
least since 1996, when I joined Ericsson.)

I want to wish you all a Happy New Year and good luck with
your continued Erlang programming. The increasing strength
of the Erlang community suggests that there will be even
more opportunities to work with Erlang in the coming years.

For those who struggle to get acceptance from their peers
because of their strange inclination towards an odd
programming tool from the North, I want to finish with a
quote from an amazing book that I`m currently reading --
about someone who wasn`t appreciated in his lifetime either.

"Born in Poland and educated in Italy, Copernicus lived
during the height of the Renaissance. Though it was destined
to become an unquestioned principle of existence for the
modern psyche, the central tenet of his vision [that the
Earth moves around the Sun] was inconceivable to most
Europeans in his own lifetime. More than any single factor,
it was the Copernican insight that provoked and symbolized
the drastic, fundamental break from the ancient and medieval
universe to that of the modern era. [...] Yet, throughout
most of his life, Copernicus held back from full publication
of his extraordinary idea.  (Later, in his preface to the
_De Revolutionibus_, dedicated to the pope, Copernicus
confessed his reluctance to reveal publicly his insight into
nature`s mysteries lest it be scorned by the uninitiated --
invoking the Pythagorean practice of strict secrecy in such
matters.)  [...] On the last day of his life, in the year
1543, a copy of the published work was brought to
Copernicus.
  But on that day, and even during the following several
decades, there was little indication in Europe that an
unprecedented revolution in the Western world view had been
initiated.  For most who heard of it, the new conception was
so contradictory to everyday experience, so patently false,
as to not require serious discussion. But as a few
proficient astronomers began to find Copernicus`s argument
persuasive, the opposition began to mount; and it was the
religious implications of the new cosmology that quickly
provoked the most intense attacks."

(From "The passion of the Western mind", (c) 1991, Richard
Tarnas, published by Ballantines Books, ISBN:
0-345-36089-6. )

/Uffe
-- 
Ulf Wiger, Senior Specialist,
   / / /   Architecture & Design of Carrier-Class Software
  / / /    Strategic Product & System Management
 / / /     Ericsson Telecom AB, ATM Multiservice Networks