The Best Erlang Propaganda You'll Ever See

Back in the old days (about 1 month ago), when my blog had about 10 visitors a day (most of whom came to download the XCode plugin for haXe I created), I fully enjoyed the unbridled freedom the blogging medium has given me in my writings about Erlang. My readers (reader?) were all interested in Erlang. Every statement I made about Erlang's strengths was taken as obvious. Justifying my arguments was as easy as saying 'duh.'

Times have changed.

My blog now gets over 1000 page views a day, and some days, when it's featured on reddit.com, it reaches over 5000 page views. With this deluge of new readers, I have suddenly found myself having to contend with an unfamiliar challenge: the Skeptics.

Many of my readers are very intelligent, experienced programmers. Some of them are knowledgeable about if not experts in just about every computer language you can imagine (well, maybe short of Brainf*ck). Erlang is different from many languages, and therefore many of my visitors write very good comments pointing out aspects of Erlang that they don't like or where they think Erlang falls short of other languages.

Like every language, Erlang has some shortcomings. Erlang is a tool, not a panacea. Erlang happens to be a very good tool for building scalable, fault-tolerant, distributed systems, which is primarily why I am so interested in it, but it's not a silver bullet. Depending on your needs, other languages are arguably better than Erlang: Perl for regexps and string processing, OCaml for raw performance, Haskell for its purity and type system, Ruby/Python/PHP for scripting and (some) database-driven webapps, Java for abundance of libraries (and programmers), C# if you're coding for the .NET platform, Prolog for logic programming, C/C++ for desktop programming, etc.

Still, I don't like dealing with skeptics.

You see, I'm at the helm of a well-greased Erlang hype machine, and I'm on a take-no-prisioners mission to recruit every programmer with an internet connection into the cult of Erlang. If you're a programmer, I won't rest until you think in Erlang; talk in Erlang; dream in Erlang. When I'm done with you, your life will be a list; your being will be a tuple; you will communicate to your family and coworkers by asynchronous message passing; your actions will be functions; your consciousness will run on pattern matching.

You will forget your objects. Your shared memory will become Mnesia.

To achieve this nefarious goal of mine, I decided it's time to bring out the big guns.

This is no fun and games anymore. This is war for the hearts and minds of programmers from faraway paradigms. I'm here at my command and control center, and I mean business.

Enough talk. It's time for action.

Without further ado, I present to you my secret weapon, as well as the best Erlang propaganda you'll ever see: The Erlang Movie.

(Try as hard as you can, I know you won't be able to resist hitting that "Play" button.)

...

Now that you've seen the Erlang Movie, we can resume rational discourse regarding the merits of this language. The only condition is that you have to blindingly accept everything I say. You also have to first run around the streets shouting at the top of your lungs "I've seen the light! It's called 'Erlang'!"

Deal? :)

...

Now back to serious writing: please don't take anything I've said here seriously!!!

Update: quick poll -- how many of you have watched the whole thing? :)