Erlang communities and Activities report

[C.Reinke]

> As Matthias mentioned, there is a comprehensive list of Erlang links at
> 
> http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Erlang/
> 
> It contains projects, products (ongoing and terminated), research, 
> commercial support, articles, thesis, conferences, contributions, and 
> all links relating to Erlang I was able to find. There are a couple 
> hundred links right now, which should approach 300 as soon as I have a 
> couple of days over to add them. Until then, if you have any links feel 
> free to add them yourself in the add section or email them to me (The 
> latter might take longer to include them).

And just to clear up a potential misunderstanding that someone
has pointed out to me off-list: my suggestions were not directed 
against this useful resource, nor against the collection at 
erlang.org. I was just pointing out that a combination of such 
reference collections and regular surveys/reports would be even 
more useful, and that both represent services to the community 
that need everyone's support to work well.

Of course, I don't know how Joe is going to organize the Erlang
variant of the Activities Reports, but if it's going to be anything
like the Haskell variant, the collections and reports are going
to complement each other. They won't compete because they have
different goals. 

One useful metaphor is that of journals/magazines and reference 
handbooks: the latter make poor reading on a train or plane, and 
you can't hand them to interested outsiders hoping they might 
get a good overview. The former aren't the first choice for 
looking up what you know must be somewhere, but you keep reading
them when they come out to stay up to date with developments,
and they are a useful starting point to get acquainted with
a new field.

So, please, support both kinds of effort: the editors can't
guess what gems you're hiding on your disk, and your fellow
programmers might just be waiting for that hobby horse you're
riding every now and then, when you find the time.

And once there is a regular report full of executive summaries
of recent activities, perhaps you can show it to your boss or
customer. Who knows, you might no longer have to hide your 
Erlang code and tuples by recoding in C++ and XML (if I recall
that story from the Erlang User Conference correctly;-).

Hth,
Claus