A Pythonista's Impressions of Erlang

[Matthias Lang]

Bengt Kleberg writes:

 > the best (imho) way to access erlang documentation is through this 
 > interface:

 > http://www.corelatus.com/~matthias/modules.html

I'm glad others find it useful, but I suspect it's not of much use to
a beginner---the whole idea is that you already know what you're
looking for.

bry@REDACTED wrote:

 > I went through the thread and was pleasently surprised as i think
 > it turned out pretty nice, but I noted that while people ragged
 > on the guys understanding of erlang (at least from my viewpoint
 > it seemed like ragging) there was a general quiet were the
 > difficulties of finding resources, documentation etc. were
 > discussed. Any takes on that subject?

Here's what he wrote about documentation:

  | Documentation: Most of the links to documentation on erlang.org are
  | broken. When you finally do get to the docs (mysteriously at erlang.se
  | instead of erlang.org), there are some real gems. When you click on
  | "Complete List of BIFs" (BIF = built-in function) in the reference
  | manual, you get "For a complete list of BIFs, their arguments and
  | return values, refer to erlang(3).".
  | 
  | The kicker? When I downloaded and installed Erlang, the man pages
  | either weren't installed or weren't put in the right place. So, as a
  | newbie, I am left digging away from the main erlang site just to find
  | out what the f$%$ing built-in functions are. Not a good sign.

Broken links: yes, there are quite a few. It'd help if he noted which
ones were broken (he does point in the general direction further down
in the blog). Finding broken internal links shouldn't be hard... Maybe
someone would care to recommend a tool.

Aside: every time I update the FAQ, I go through all the links
manually and check they work. And each time I do that, I find a couple
of dozen links which are broken, but there's no mechanical way of
checking, because the destination still give me a page, just not the
page I wanted. Classic example: xml.net was once a site with some Java
XML software. Now it has nothing to do with XML and includes ads for
"adult friend finder".

The "Complete List of BIFs" is indeed pretty lame. See it for yourself
at

  http://www.erlang.se/doc/doc-5.4.3/doc/reference_manual/introduction.html#1.4

it's probably a left-over from when the documentation was just
man-pages. It should be a link to

  http://www.erlang.se/doc/doc-5.4.3/lib/kernel-2.10.3/doc/html/erlang.html

I don't get the "kicker" at the end. I can't see how to improve the
download page:

       http://www.erlang.org/download.html

either you download the documentation or you don't. Seems perfectly
clear to me. Maybe he was using a broken RPM.

Matt