Never trust a statistics you didn't forge yourself

[Marc van Woerkom]

Hello,

I just got a copy of your survey results and I am upset 
about it:

First you write: 

> To raise more interest for the survey and generate submissions, we have sent messages to
> several discussion groups, once shortly after the start of the survey and once shortly before
> the end:
> ? Usenet: comp.parallel, comp.parallel.mpi, comp.parallel.pvm, comp.sys.super,
> aus.computers.parallel, comp.programming.threads
> ? Mailing Lists: beowulf@REDACTED, lam@REDACTED, omp@REDACTED,
> compunity@REDACTED, bspall@REDACTED
> ? Forums: CodeGuru Forum, Intel Developer Services Forum
> ? Websites: slashdot.org

then

> We know of one incident, where
> an influential member of the Erlang community requested 
> members of their mailing list
> to show their support for Erlang by participating in the
> survey, which they promptly did.
> Incidents like this one have of course influenced the 
> results as well.

This implies that some kind of guru is able to motivate 
his minions.

I can't remember who it was who posted this to erlang 
mailing list. I was just informed that there was a survey 
and of course it made perfect sense to participate as I am 
a user of a concurrent language. That's what it is good 
for.

There are obviously at least two camps of concurrent 
problems - the massive number crunching ones and the ones 
where you have lots of parallel transactions in a possibly 
distributed system - that's where Erlang is strong.


You obviously posted to

- comp.parallel.pvm
- beowulf@REDACTED
- omp@REDACTED

all from the number crunchers camp and even to

- CodeGuru Forum

which is a Java forum.

Why did you not post to the erlang list yourself?


> We have already told you the reasons for the relatively > > high numbers for Erlang in section
> 2, so please treat them with caution. What can be deduced > from these numbers,
> though, is that Erlang has a very active user community 
> and it is obviously possible to
> write parallel programs in Erlang.

You could have known before.

Regards,
Marc van Woerkom