[erlang-questions] What problem are we trying to solve here? [was Erland users group [was re: languages in use? [was: Time for OTP to be Renamed?]]]

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 17/02/2014, at 2:56 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> That seems like a red herring to me.  Is the learning curve really that steep?

For me,
 - the language was NO effort to pick up
 - experience with other declarative languages
   helped a LOT (A* is pretty easy)
 - learning to think in terms of concurrency
   after decades of sequential is hard
 - it's a LOT easier to do concurrency in
   Erlang than in say Concurrent ML or Smalltalk
BUT
 - picking up the tools is not so easy.

What is the answer?
  It is documentation, documentation, documentation.

Tutorials, how-tos, books (to the authors of Erlang books,
humble thanks).

For example, it was easier for me to write my own XML parser
in C than to cope with libxml's documentation (if that's not
too strong a word).