openstack team mailing list archive

[Eric Day <eday@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 06:46:58PM +0000, Chris Behrens wrote:
> Do we have enough Erlang knowledge right now?  I would not want to see Eric get burned out because he can't get help.  I've seen it happen before when Erlang was chosen and the project ended up a complete failure.

Knowing the inside-reference, the were two problems with this
particular situation. One was that we were using Erlang in 2005, and
it is much different now. We've seen many new open source projects
based on Erlang, and the community has grown. The other problem was
we were only limited to finding people we could hire, rather than
opening up contributions and support to an entire community.

Having said all that, it is possible we'll not get the traction, just
the same for C++. Open source Erlang folks are very github oriented as
well, which means doing this in bzr/lp will turn some external Erlang
folks off (not bringing this up to discuss or suggesting we change,
just pointing out a fact :).

> I'd like to learn Erlang better.  But, I wouldn't to be able to help significantly any time soon... or at least not where I could contribute the quality of code that this project needs.  It feels like I've seen a lot of similar replies.

Understood. The nice thing is that Erlang is a very simple and small
language, but it does come with a paradigm shift. Someone new to C++,
even with a C and/or Python background, will certainly have challenges
as well since C++ is fairly large and does things other OO languages
don't (usually out of necessity around memory management, RAII,
templates, ...).

Developers, especially those good with concurrency issues and large
scale design, will be good in any language when they have a desire
to participate, so I'm not too worried about loosing potential talent.

-Eric