Longstanding issues: structs & standalone Erlang

[Peter Lund]

Personally I am convinced it would help marketing erlang a lot and here 
is the reasoning:

When a friend (or customer) of a erlang enthusiast wonders what can be 
done in erlang, the enthusiast naturally wants to send the friend (a 
windows user) a demo of something that the friend can run directly on 
his computer.

Then the enthusiast says: "sorry, but to do this you need first to do A 
then B and C, then *hopefully* it works. Please tell me if you have any 
problem and I'll help you out running the demo".

How many minus points do you think Erlang as a language gets in the 
friend's mind when receiving such an email??

Yes it is true that Erlang do not get many plus points just because the 
demo is easy for the friend/customer/manager to install and run, because 
that is the *normal* / *expected* behaviour of any demo in any other 
language. But if Erlang is perceived too complicated and only something 
for nerds and geeks, Erlang looses lots of the strong credibility it 
should have for its potential to be the language for a company's next 
big project development.

That is why I think that any packaging tool that helps the erlang 
enthusiast creating a minimal erlang environment + demo app (for windows 
foremost) with options to include other stuff as well would be very 
useful for the marketing of Erlang. If this tool also handles a lot more 
it would just be a lot better of course.

/Peter

Robert Virding wrote:

> Kostis Sagonas skrev:
>
>> Bengt Kleberg wrote:
>>  > On 2006-02-15 21:01, Claes Wikstrom wrote:
>>  > ...deleted
>>  > > 1. Strip down OTP and make a base package consisting
>>  > >    or erts, compiler, stdlib and kernel.
>>  >  > a good idea.
>>
>> So far, I have not read any extremely convincing arguments why
>> doing this will make Erlang more popular or easy to adopt for
>> serious project development. So I am not sure whether this is
>> such a good idea as others think it is.
>
>
> I forgot to add that I also wonder if it would make Erlang more 
> popular, but it would be easier to make stand-alone applications that 
> don't contain everything. It would also make it easier to build new 
> implementations as the dependencies become clearer. (and hopefully the 
> boot sequence)
>
> Robert
>