Language Bindings for Erlang Again

[Yariv Sadan]

> The other point of view is to open Erlang to other language, because
> what is to notice about Erlang? Everybody says that it's a very
> attractive language, but as far as I can see, it is very few used.
> This is the paradox of Erlang.
> For example, there is now millions of web site, but who knows one site
> written in Erlang?

I know of a site: http://yaws.hyber.org/ :)

Seriously, though, I have wondered about the same question. If Erlang
is so well suited for distributed applications (which are most
non-trivial web applications), why is it not more popular? My theory
is that the barrier to entry is too high. If you're a PHP programmer,
there just isn't an easy way for you to hit the ground running if you
want to create a web app in Erlang. You have to invest quite a lot of
time into learning Erlang, OTP, Mnesia and Yaws, and all together this
is quite intimidating.

I think Erlang would get much more popular if it had a framework
similar to Ruby on Rails. Before Ruby on Rails, relatively few
programmers have used Ruby, but the success of Ruby on Rails  has made
the Ruby language quite popular. I think the same can happen with
Erlang if Erlang had such a framework.

As a first step towards such a framework, I thought about writing a
script that would take a .hrl file, parse its record definitions
(representing database objects), and then generate all the code
required to set up a simple web app using Mnesia and Yaws. This would
help newcomers overcome the initial barrier to entry for Erlang web
development.

That's my 2c :)

Yariv