He's doing this in good faith because I, the original poster, asked him too. This is the best answer on the page (for me).

But this doesn't tell you anything, other than that someone who's not interested and pressed for time won't put any effort into it. It's a trivial result.

Well, if the question is "Why isn't Erlang more popular?" then I would think that pointing out that "someone who's not interested and pressed for time won't put any effort into it" is a perfectly fine answer. The clear implication is that the resources currently available for would-be Erlang adopters require an unrealistic level of interest and time to get them over the hump. It tells an Erlang evangelist precisely what she needs to do: do more to sell the language to people who have little time or inclination to rally dig into a language they otherwise know nothing about. (Of course, while it may be a useful answer, it is not very interesting for the rest of us.)

> the resources currently available for would-be Erlang adopters require an unrealistic level of interest and time to get them over the hump.

The person who can't be bothered to even find 'Learn You Some Erlang' also won't have the motivation to learn Erlang. It does take effort, but there now are many good resources available (unlike the situation just a few years ago).

I believe you missed the point. When I first heard about Go, I went to the official website and I was immediately presented with a few code examples. The go tour was fascinatingly good introductory material. Furthermore, the documentation and language specification are very concise, clear and full of examples.

What am I trying to say? Put effort into presenting your language and I will put effort into going through the material.

Give me two shit and that's how much interest you will get from me.

However, I put my own effort into finding more resources. I tried Erlang, it was OK, but I wasn't very comfortable working with the syntax. I've never needed any special feature in Erlang that I couldn't accomplish in another language.

No, I get the point, but I don't agree with it, at least not to that extent.

> Put effort into presenting your language and I will put effort into going through the material. Give me two shit and that's how much interest you will get from me.

See, I really don't think it's worth courting people who have that attitude. If your motivation is _that_ low, it's probably not for you anyway. At this point, even people who don't have a real need for Erlang/OTP, but who still enjoy learning for the sake of learning, can find great introductory material.

Lots of people enjoy learning for the sake of learning, but there is an infinite amount of things out there for people to learn. If you don't spend some effort to convince people "Hey, this thing there is really worth learning!" then they won't - even if they are not lazy. No one - even non-lazy people - has the time to learn about everything.

> See, I really don't think it's worth courting people who have that attitude.

What attitude? Someone goes to a website out of curiosity, but it isn't very helpful so they leave. (Who hasn't done this?)

Erlang might be EXACTLY the thing they need, but on the subject of why Erlang isn't more popular--subpar marketing is more than relevant.

The person who can't be bothered to find something they don't know exists. Seriously?

It tells you that the primary route to finding out about Erlang for someone who knots nothing about it (ie Google it and have a nosey) its no bloody good.

If someone tells me to try out a new language I generally give it about 10-15 minutes. If I'm not running hello world by then I'm not interested in something I'd be taking a casual interest in. The only time I'm giving it more than 15 minutes is when I have a real business need for it or want to enhance my resume with something that has a lot of businesses seeking that skill. Python, for example, I was easily able to get up and running in under 15 minutes with a hello world and now I use it regularly for lots of little tasks. I can't be fussed to toy around something that takes too much work/infrastructure to get up and running. There's other options out there I can be more productive in faster.

100% of erlang tutorials are for fibonnaci.

I once challenged Scott Fritchie to give an Erlang talk at our local ruby group (rum.mn) without implementing Eratosthenes' sieve, and sure enough he did, using elevators of all things.

I was so impressed with Erlang that i'm still banging my head on it nearly 10 (half-hearted) years later.

I never understood why every language has a plethora of fibonnaci tutorials. "DO THE FIBONNACI IN X USING Z PROGRAMMING PARADIGM" ok thanks, no more please.

Because you already:

1. Know what the Fibonnaci numbers are.

2. How to compute them.

3. Said computation is straight-forward, but it requires some form of looping (either recursion or iteration) and some form of arithmetic.

The combination of those traits means that if I present code to compute the Fibonnaci number for an arbitrary number in some random programming language, you can infer a lot about that programming language. In other words, the only variable in that situation is the programming language itself, which allows you to use the other information you already know to learn about that language relatively quickly.

I don't think so.