[erlang-questions] A farewell to Erlang

[Evan Miller]

Friends and heroes,


As some of you know I run a couple of popular open-source Erlang projects
(Chicago Boss, the Rails-like web framework, and ErlyDTL, the Django
template library). As of today I am retiring from the projects.


This retirement has been in the works for several months, so I am pleased
to announce that both projects will be in good hands. ErlyDTL will be taken
over by Andreas Stenius, who is an active contributor to the Zotonic
project as well as to ErlyDTL. Andreas has been doing great work
reconciling mainline ErlyDTL with the Zotonic fork of ErlyDTL, and I'm
excited to see the code that emerges. Andreas will be the third maintainer
in ErlyDTL's history; in 2009 I took over duties from Roberto Saccon, who
started the project in 2007. Watch out for a 0.8 announcement from Andreas
in the coming weeks.


I started Chicago Boss several years ago with a vision of harnessing the
power of Erlang to deliver modern websites. Most of the pieces of that
vision are in place, but it still needs a bit of work before victory can be
declared. I've been in charge of Chicago Boss since its inception, and I'm
afraid it has become a bit larger than what one person can manage. So I'm
very pleased to announce that two members of the Erlang community will be
driving development from here to version 1.0.


The new leadership team is Zachary Kessin and Dmitry Polyanovsky. You might
know Zach from the Mostly Erlang podcast as well as the "Building Web
Applications with Erlang" O'Reilly book. Although new to Chicago Boss,
he'll be working on the framework full-time under the direction of Dmitry,
who is a longtime CB contributor. Zach and Dmitry have been actively adding
tests, docs, and error messages to Chicago Boss in order to bring the
project to maturity. They were 100% responsible for the recent successful
0.8.8 and 0.8.9 releases of the framework, and I can't wait to see what's
next from them.


You can read my full announcement about the CB transition (including my
reasons for moving on) here:


https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/chicagoboss/ekU5gZ_Ty2o


I'm happy to say that the Chicago Boss project and community are in better
shape than ever, so if you like the idea of building an easy-to-use web
framework in Erlang, now is a great time to get involved!


By the way, the repositories have been moved off of my personal GitHub
account to fresh URLs, so please update your bookmarks accordingly
(assuming you still do that sort of thing):


https://github.com/erlydtl/erlydtl

https://github.com/ChicagoBoss


On a personal note, since Chicago Boss and ErlyDTL were the only things
keeping me hacking in Erlang, I'm afraid you won't have me to "kick around"
anymore. I learned a tremendous amount from the Erlang community, and the
two conferences I attended last year were pure geek heaven. I consider the
Erlang VM to be a modern marvel of software engineering, and it was a true
privilege to get to know some of the brains behind it. But there's a time
for all things, and I believe it's time for me to move on to other projects.


I have particularly relished my role as an iconoclast, protector of the
pmods, and occasional straw-man here on the erlang-questions mailing list.
If for some perverse reason you'd like to carry on my memory here, just
remember 1) we all got into programming because it was fun 2) nice syntax
is sometimes more important than program correctness and 3) great things
often begin life as dirty hacks.


So much for valediction. It's been a fun ride. Goodbye, Erlang! I'll carry
the gospel of crashing wherever I go.


Evan

-- 
Evan Miller
http://www.evanmiller.org/
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