Tuesday, April 01, 2008

ErlyWeb renamed "Erlang on Rails"

Erlang is *almost* a tipping point. Thanks to reddit, many people are interested in it. However, it's not there yet. Despite being the only language that got concurrency right, and all its other standout features, many developers still use other languages. The only explanation I can think of is that Erlang hasn't had much PR over the years (the Erlang movie nonwithstanding). I'm confident that a good PR boost will help push Erlang over the hill. Unfortunately, Ericsson doesn't seem interested in heavily promoting Erlang the way Microsoft promotes .NET and Sun promotes Java (this may be because many Ericsson employees have never heard of Erlang). So, I decided to take things into my own hands. I don't have a budget, so I need to get creative. The best way to succeed if you're small is to ride a big wave -- and what's a better wave to ride than Ruby on Rails?

Ruby on Rails is very popular -- much more than ErlyWeb. I believe this popularity is due to the "on Rails" meme, which is just bursting with positive connotations. It sounds young, fresh, happy. It's the anti-enterprisy software. It emancipates you from burdensome type systems, explicit getters and setters, and (ugh) XML. Its metaprogramming wizardry is made of bliss. Its evokes images of riding in environmentally-friendly transportation looking out the window at grassy meadows, rolling hills and sunny skies.

I think that renaming ErlyWeb to "Erlang on Rails" will help win over the hearts and minds of many programmers who are currently on the fence. They may be curious about Erlang but are turned off by its telcom image. "Erlang on Rails" conveys a more balanced feeling of industrial strength applications from the telcom world mixed with the social Web 2.0 era of interconnectedness that celebrates the rise of individualism over grey corporate culture.

2008 will be the year of Erlang on Rails. I know it.

Update: This was an April Fool's joke, in case it's not obvious anymore :)

13 comments:

baxter said...

lol...

Travis Swicegood said...

Nice... Does this mean we have to give up the nine 9's of reliability though and setup a supervisor in Perl to reboot the server every few hours? ;-)

Miles said...

Ah, yours is the first April Fools that -almost- got me. Nice job.

Oscar Del Ben said...

ahahah nice

Dmitrii 'Mamut' Dimandt said...

Erlang On Rails -> EOR -> [EE - ohr] -> may be change to Eeyore?

:)))

Michael Campbell said...

Dammit, you got me. And I *HATE* 1 April, so I generally am very wary of this sort of thing, but to be fair, I read it on 2 Apr.

Oliver Mason said...

Ooops. I only read the post on rss, and also on 02/04. My first thought was 'why imitate those Ruby guys?' And then I read the comments...

Erlang on the Tipping Point? « Language and Computation said...

[...] the Tipping Point? 2 April 2008 Posted by ojmason in Uncategorized. trackback Yariv wants to rename the Erlang web framework ErlyWeb to ‘Erlang on Rails’, as he believes Erlang is on the tipping point, and such a name change would swing more programmers [...]

Jim Tittsler said...

Maybe "Erlang on Maglev" would indicate that it is a faster, more modern framework.

Anonymous said...

Yariv, I love you, but...

That's about the stupidest name ever! It pretty much admits you are not as good as Rails, and the best you can do is to "live up to it".

It doesn't set you apart.

Please, please, please keep it ErlyWeb.

Yariv said...

April fool's :)

marrtins said...

Almost got me >:D

wOoops - it`s almost as good as to wake up from nightmare :)) That would be really really terrible name, total disgrace (not really fall on RoR)

Akshay Surve said...

I am sure you would float it in the community before deciding on a new name ;)

BTW even I put it up as Erlang on Rails when I talked about it on my blog:

http://www.akshaysurve.com/blog/2008/02/erlyweb-erlangonrails/