[erlang-questions] Convincing industry to use Erlang

[Banibrata Dutta]

As Alain rightly said, Joe you just managed to condense couple of books, and
I'd say a semester's worth of study on Solution Selling and Agile
development. Essentially that's all you need to know. Rest you'd probably
figure out on the way. All of this applies to other languages as well, and
had this been a bulletin-board style discussion forum, I'd have voted for
this to be a sticky !!

On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 3:21 PM, Joe Armstrong <erlang@REDACTED> wrote:

> 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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> >
> >
>
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>


-- 
regards,
Banibrata
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bdutta
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