[erlang-questions] languages in use? [was: Time for OTP to be Renamed?]

[Ali Sabil]

Not a lot of money necessarily, what you want is to create awareness around
Erlang first, you want the people who hear about it or see it to remember
it. This effectively builds up familiarity.

When you are past that point you can start thinking about explaining the
benefits and advantages. Unfortunately I think that we don't focus enough
in this community on the 1st step and jump directly to the 2nd.

On Saturday, February 15, 2014, Loïc Hoguin <essen@REDACTED> wrote:

> On 02/15/2014 02:28 PM, Carsten Bormann wrote:
>
>> I’d suggest other people read it with the same point of view, and focus
>> less on how to prove Pieter wrong on this mailing list, and more on ways
>> forward to counteract the undesirable perceptions on a wider scale.
>>
>
> To make a comparison, it generally goes like this:
>
> What's Go? -> Language from Google by the Unix people -> I know and like
> those, therefore Go must be good too, plus it looks similar to what I'm
> used to.
>
> What's Erlang? -> Language from Ericsson invented 25+ years ago -> Really?
> I'm not sure what Ericsson does... If it was invented 25 years ago and I
> haven't heard about it yet it must not be very good, plus it's not OO so it
> must not be very useful.
>
> You can't fix that.
>
> What you can fix about perception is actually minimal stuff. Like changing
> the name. Using release numbers that aren't from another planet. And so on.
>
> I like to bring up MongoDB when talking about Erlang's perception. MongoDB
> is the slow equivalent of /dev/null. Everyone knows that, even people who
> use it. Yet despite this it became very popular very fast. Why? Because
> they could pour money down the marketing hole (plus they are marketing
> geniuses, seriously, read up on it).
>
> They understood that what matters most initially is *not* perception, but
> simply being known. And that's the problem. Nobody knows Erlang. Perception
> matters very little, people talking about it is what matters. If one person
> tells you about Erlang and how awesome it is, you will just forget about it
> the next day. But if you keep bumping into people who tell you all about
> Erlang, not only the good but also the bad, you take notice.
>
> It's nothing new really. I'm sure there's a saying somewhere about how the
> worst isn't being hated but being ignored.
>
> This problem can be solved, but it requires either complete marketing
> geniuses (no offense but what ESL is doing is not genius) or a lot of
> money, preferrably both.
>
> --
> Loïc Hoguin
> http://ninenines.eu
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