Blogging About Erlang

Wow. I read today some of my old articles and I must say I wish I had spent some more time refining them before I hit that 'publish' button. They're not all bad... Even the more enthusiastic ones are definitely amusing at least for a personal blog of a hacker discovering a wonderful new toy. However, now that my blog became more popular than it had been when I wrote most of them I feel that it calls for a more sober writing style. I have learned that many of my readers are quite hype-weary from J2EE and then Ruby being sold to them as the Next Great Thing, and the last thing I would want is for them to feel the same about Erlang.

ERLANG SUCKS. DON'T USE IT!!! STICK WITH RUBY!!!

There. Now nobody can accuse me of hype instigation :)

Then again, maybe my initial learning towards a controversial writing style has drawn more people's attention to my blog, and I'll do anything to serve The Cause... Just kidding... :)

I think most reddit readers have gotten by now what makes Erlang different. From now on, I will let the language sell itself, and focus my writing about the topic about which I care the most: the code.

(I also promise I will never write an article about Agile development. I don't even know what it really means!!! I guess my ignorance makes my coding Sluggish :) )

Believe it or not, I don't care *that* much if Erlang becomes mainstream. It would be great if many people used it, if for no other reason than the satisfaction they would experience by using a real functional language that makes concurrent programming a joy. The main reason I started blogging about Erlang is that I recognized it would be a great tool writing certain apps, and the last thing I wanted was when people would me how I built something and I would say, "I used Erlang," they would ask "ErlWhat???"

Despite my nitpicking, I'm pretty happy with the way things have played out so far. From other articles I'm reading these days, I get the impression that now many more people understand and respect Erlang. If nothing else, I have a lot of respect for the people who created Erlang because they have solved some of the hardest problems in creating tools for building scalable, fault-tolerant, distributed systems -- an area that feels mostly abandoned by most programming languages. They also gave their creation to us for free. I wouldn't be as good a programmer if I hadn't spent the time using Erlang and learning what makes it special.

In the spirit of American capitalism, I should try to make a buck from my blog. Therefore, expect my new book to hit the stores in two months: Sluggish Development With Erlang for the Hype-Averse, Battle-Scarred Programmer :)