[erlang-questions] Forget Erlang on the Java VM. More language on the Erlang VM are needed!

[Yariv Sadan]

> Dave Thomas of Pragmatic Programmers is rolling out courses together
> with Joe Armstrong but Erlang will keep being a novelty for some time
> to come. The biggest impact that YOU can make is to roll out cool
> Erlang-based projects.
>
> CouchDB counts, Erlyweb not so much. People want to buy 1/4 holes and
> not 1/4 drills.

"CouchDB counts, ErlyWeb not so much". Do you care to explain that?

I think ErlyWeb will do much more for Erlang's spread and adoption
than CouchDB. Users of CouchDB you don't need to know squat about
Erlang except for maybe how to install it. ErlyWeb provides developers
the best set of tools to build something -- in Erlang -- that other
people use.

I would argue that without a web framework like ErlyWeb, Erlang will
never be popular. Look at PHP, Ruby, Python, even C# and Java. Those
languages have gotten popular because they cater to the needs of web
developers. If there's no way to easily build web applications in a
given language, much fewer independent developers will use it, even
just for experimentation.

As web servers gain more and more cores, I predict that ErlyWeb will
start to gain more and more adoption from developers who currently use
Ruby on Rails, which requires 30MB of RAM (!) for each process.

Putting aside subjective arguments, ErlyWeb has been downloaded
thousands of times and its mailing list has 251 developers compared to
CouchDB's 182.

Cheers,
Yariv