Longstanding issues: structs & standalone Erlang

[bryan rasmussen]

"Yes it is true that Erlang do not get many plus points just because the
demo is easy for the friend/customer/manager to install and run, because
that is the *normal* / *expected* behaviour of any demo in any other
language."

It is?

I'm pretty sure programs written in Java do not install as
unobtrusively/smoothly as the average .exe.

Nonetheless I am also for having a packaging deal.

Cheers,
Bryan Rasmussen




On 2/21/06, Peter Lund <erlang@REDACTED> wrote:
> Personally I am convinced it would help marketing erlang a lot and here
> is the reasoning:
>
> When a friend (or customer) of a erlang enthusiast wonders what can be
> done in erlang, the enthusiast naturally wants to send the friend (a
> windows user) a demo of something that the friend can run directly on
> his computer.
>
> Then the enthusiast says: "sorry, but to do this you need first to do A
> then B and C, then *hopefully* it works. Please tell me if you have any
> problem and I'll help you out running the demo".
>
> How many minus points do you think Erlang as a language gets in the
> friend's mind when receiving such an email??
>
> Yes it is true that Erlang do not get many plus points just because the
> demo is easy for the friend/customer/manager to install and run, because
> that is the *normal* / *expected* behaviour of any demo in any other
> language. But if Erlang is perceived too complicated and only something
> for nerds and geeks, Erlang looses lots of the strong credibility it
> should have for its potential to be the language for a company's next
> big project development.
>
> That is why I think that any packaging tool that helps the erlang
> enthusiast creating a minimal erlang environment + demo app (for windows
> foremost) with options to include other stuff as well would be very
> useful for the marketing of Erlang. If this tool also handles a lot more
> it would just be a lot better of course.
>
> /Peter
>
> Robert Virding wrote:
>
> > Kostis Sagonas skrev:
> >
> >> Bengt Kleberg wrote:
> >>  > On 2006-02-15 21:01, Claes Wikstrom wrote:
> >>  > ...deleted
> >>  > > 1. Strip down OTP and make a base package consisting
> >>  > >    or erts, compiler, stdlib and kernel.
> >>  >  > a good idea.
> >>
> >> So far, I have not read any extremely convincing arguments why
> >> doing this will make Erlang more popular or easy to adopt for
> >> serious project development. So I am not sure whether this is
> >> such a good idea as others think it is.
> >
> >
> > I forgot to add that I also wonder if it would make Erlang more
> > popular, but it would be easier to make stand-alone applications that
> > don't contain everything. It would also make it easier to build new
> > implementations as the dependencies become clearer. (and hopefully the
> > boot sequence)
> >
> > Robert
> >
>