[erlang-questions] Convincing industry to use Erlang

[Joe Armstrong]

As soon as you know *anything* about the requirements of the system
start building
a prototype - show the customer the prototype.

At the next meeting say "I don't really know what your problem is but
I've built a little
prototype to test my understanding ..."

Do not tell them "your problem is easy" (never, never, never (even if
it is), this is
always perceived as an insult)

Offer the customer a fixed price, fixed delivery time, pre-development
prototype.
The cost of this should be less than the cost of making a requirements
specification.

Do not make an offer for the final product - say "I cannot I do not
know enough" -

Try to deliver a working prototype within three weeks - even if they
don't pay - do it anyway.

Assume you will land the project and start working on it today.

Don't sell the final product - but the next step - which should be
small understandable, cheap
and quickly delivered. Tell them this is "agile" and you are a "scrum
master" - they will love this
you don't have to know what the words mean - these are just magic
words that need to be said.

Do not use words like "functional" "proof" etc. these have bad karma.

Start building the prototype as soon as you read this mail.

This approach has worked many times.

You're selling time-to-market and low-development costs - they will be
skeptical - you
will do this with 10% of the effort needed for Java/C++ - but they
will not believe you. So
go do it ...

Cheers, and congratulations on landing the project :-)

/Joe


On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 8:59 PM, Paulo Alexandre Ferreira
<paf@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>
> You better not try to sell  Erlang, or any language to managers.
>
>
> You should try  selling a reliable, robust, fault-tolerant, code verified  system.
> You will do code upgrades without stopping the system.
> You can offer proofs the system is correct.
>
>
> They don't want Erlang.  They don't care about Erlang.
>
> You will use Erlang to build the system they want.
>
> The advantages of language X,Y or Z are the stuff programmers care about.
> Managers care about  different things like  costs, down-time, reliability.
> Focus on that.
>
>
> My apologies if I sound  a little bit grumpy.
>
> Paulo Ferreira
>
>
>
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