[erlang-questions] Support for newcomers and the popularity of Erlang

[Jesse Gumm]

I think all of us have at some point or another posted something that had
no responses. I know I have.

I find, especially in the mailing list context, that for members for whom
their best answer is "I don't know" you're less likely to get a response
than if it were a more traditional forum.

Further, it really helps to pare down the question to its simplest form,
requiring the least amount of work from the members of the list. In my
case, I tend to make too-long narratives that require too much reading on
the part of the contributors who undoubtedly just mentally skip over it in
"tl;dr" fashion.

When that happens, it's my fault for not asking the right question.

So my general recommendation is to make an effort to ask concise questions,
and include code snippets directly in the post rather than posting links
to  pastebins, etc. (after all, link clicking is additional effort).

In any case, I don't know the answer to the question you're referencing.

--
Jesse Gumm
Owner, Sigma Star Systems
414.940.4866
www.sigma-star.com
@jessegumm
On Mar 19, 2012 11:19 AM, "Wojciech Knapik" <wmknapik@REDACTED> wrote:

> Hello everyone
>
> I have a question regarding mnesia that the books I have and the tutorials
> I found do not answer.
>
> I tried IRC, but was refered here. I tried the Manning forum, but was
> refered here. And here I was completely ignored. Not even a "go away",
> nothing. I had to check the list archives to make sure my emails reached
> their destination.
>
> I know this isn't some paid support list and you have no obligation to
> help anyone, but with a community of this size, you decide about the
> language's popularity by answering (or not answering) people's questions.
>
> With any non-trivial project, there are situations where people have to
> depend on outside help - where the documentation available simply doesn't
> allow them to answer a question and they need the opinion of someone
> experienced with the language. And this is not C++, or Java - you can't
> just ask any coworker for help. If you don't get an answer on this list,
> you're likely not getting it anywhere.
>
> I'm now part of a group of 9 developers undertaking a rather large project
> and Erlang is, in my opinion, the perfect fit for us. Most other members of
> the group are beginning to see this too. The only problem is that none of
> us know this language. Sure, we're reading the books (and they're excellent
> btw), but you know that books only go so far...
>
> I'd like nothing more than to stick to Erlang for this project, I've been
> a fan of functional languages for years, but we've only written a page of
> code and we've already run into a problem that noone seems to want, or be
> able to help us with.
>
> We all know a number of languages and make a living developing code in
> them, so the temptation to switch to something we're familiar with, where
> support will not be a problem, is pretty big. I'm guessing this is a very
> popular scenario when Erlang is being considered for a new project (once
> you get past the fact that everyone will have to learn a new language and,
> in most cases, a new programming paradigm).
>
> I could go on, but you get the idea. Perhaps these are the things to
> discuss in the next thread about Erlang's popularity, instead of ejabberd,
> Yaws and CouchDB...
>
> br,
> WK
>
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>
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