Marketing has always been as important as making things.
These days, someone launches a new open source product with an insanely well designed web presence. This open source project has a better visual design than I could make in two months: http://www.serfdom.io (along with the related http://www.consul.io).
Erlang is still stuck in "my first bootstrap page" mode of marketing (which is an improvement over the old version which was My 12 Year Old Neighbor's First Webpage mode).
Erlang is designed to appeal to people who already like Erlang. It doesn't get all the new programmer hyperfad attention of things like Go, but people who know how to use Erlang properly do amazing things more reliably in shorter timeframes than other programmers even know how to think about.
Erlang/OTP is not a general-purpose programming environment. It solves a specific problem in a very specific way, that's not even necessarily the best way for everyone who has the problem.
Generally, for people who actually have problems that they need Erlang to solve, they know that Erlang exists. I don't think marketing it as the solution to end all solutions to agile web ninjas is a very good idea.
If you make something and nobody knows about it, did you actually make it?
Richard Hamming, May 1986:
you should spend at least as much time in the polish and presentation as you did in the original research. Now at least 50% of the time must go for the presentation. It's a big, big number.
>If you make something and nobody knows about it, did you actually make it?
Of course I did. You seem to be confusing things that you use for things that you are trying to sell (e.g. if you are an an academic, you want to sell your research as valid and worthwhile.) I use tools that I built to do work, and I've never spent a moment trying to sell the tools, but I actually made them. Some things in this world aren't even open source - people use them to make money, and never reveal them to anyone. Erlang started as an internal project, and people had to bargain to get it released externally.
You're drawing a false equivalence between marketing and substance. Erlang is doing billions of dollars of business. I love to talk about it, but the fewer people that know it, the better for me professionally. People have no idea how easy it makes everything.
These days, someone launches a new open source product with an insanely well designed web presence. This open source project has a better visual design than I could make in two months: http://www.serfdom.io (along with the related http://www.consul.io).
Erlang is still stuck in "my first bootstrap page" mode of marketing (which is an improvement over the old version which was My 12 Year Old Neighbor's First Webpage mode).
Erlang is designed to appeal to people who already like Erlang. It doesn't get all the new programmer hyperfad attention of things like Go, but people who know how to use Erlang properly do amazing things more reliably in shorter timeframes than other programmers even know how to think about.