Subject: Erlang adventures; Erlang image and "success"

[Costel Vrinceanu]

1: Erlang adventures
--------------------
Worked at this company last year on some server box.

After 1.5 failed attempts to get anywhere with it, and
a year of bitching from
my part about trying Erlang on some suitable project,
we finaly got the
manager off our back so 2 of us could spend 8
man-weeks to design, implement
and satisfactorly benchmark 40% of the required
functionality for a product
that was supposed to need 80 man-months.
All this using a platform on which we had epsilon
previous experience.

You think management was impressed?  Nah.  If I were
to shave my butt and
tatoo Java on one hemisphere and Corba on the other,
they would have payed
some sincere attention.

2: Erlang image and "success"
---------------------------------
"Success" in quotes because I think Erlang is very
successfull.
It's not popular though - not because that's a totaly
desirable thing.

People need symbols and images to venerate, keywords
for their resumes and
bumper-stickers and coffee mugs.

Now that VoIp and such is cool and everyone is
drooling at the idea of
replacing and supplementing the circuit-switched
infrastructure with packet-switched and
time-to-market is a major factor in the gold rush for
a slice of the pie ...
Wouldn't now be a good time to hype Erlang beyond
recognition?

It's a gap that needs to be filled.
All the keywords that Erlang supports natively are hot
right in this period
(mucho-nines, fault-tolerance, live code upgrade,
distributed systems, etc)


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