With considerable regret, this is my last post to this blog — at least, for the immediate future.
My interest in Erlang has in no way diminished. Indeed, in all ways but one, my explorations have more than confirmed initial impressions. But, fact is, time has tracked me down. I must, for now, focus elsewhere.
A year ago I set out to learn Erlang. I created this blog to document my stumbles and progress. I came clean from the beginning — I am not a professional programmer. But I studied diligently. I set a goal — build my own Erlang-based blog. I worked my way through the Getting Started with Erlang User’s Guide. I read Joe Armstrong’s thesis, I studied Joe’s book Programming Erlang: Software for Concurrent World, subscribed to Kevin Smith’s fine screencasts Erlang in Practice. I attended Erlang University in Palo Alto. And spent hours with Cesarini/Thompson’s Erlang Programming and the Early Access Edition of Logan et. al. Erlang and OTP in Action.
I also set out to study the landscape of Erlang web servers and frameworks — installed them on my computer, studied source code, booted them up, explored how to build on them. (See previous posts) Many generous Erlang wizards mentored me along the way, for which I’m deeply grateful.
Now, I can enthusiastically say that the above course of study should have been more than enough to guide any Erlang newbie to journeyman competency. But I fell short. In fact, I stumbled well short of my goal. I managed to code a few mnesia-based modules that enabled me to store and retrieve blog posts. But they were toys — far short of production quality.
Truth is, I had an ulterior motive for learning Erlang. I wanted to build a web platform for supporting my writing career. When I started this blog I was well into my second novel — well, third, if you count my graphic novel Aya Takeo. Creative writing was my first priority. Programming was second. Consequently, while I was diligent in studying Erlang, I spent far too few hours actually programming. Had I imposed the same discipline on programming as I did on writing, I venture that I would have surpassed my goal by now.
But, now, time has tracked me down. Not counting Aya Takeo, my first novel, Freein’ Pancho, is on the verge of publication. I’m into final revision on my second novel, The Gospel of Ashes. And I’m several chapters into El Tiburon.
So, it’s now time to get serious about marketing Aya Takeo and Freein’ Pancho. If the novelist doesn’t do the heavy lifting of marketing these days, few, if any, novels get notice. And, of course, I must get The Gospel of Ashes out the door and keep forward progress on El Tiburon.
Thus, I’ve spent the past week bringing up a marketing site for Aya Takeo. I’ll be bringing up another site soon to market Freein’ Pancho. When published, I’ll also need a site for The Gospel of Ashes. I’d hoped to be able to bring up these sites in Erlang — but I simply couldn’t climb the learning curve fast enough.
The Aya Takeo site took me about a week to build. I used Joomla, a PHP/SQL open-source content management system. As an old Cold Fusion guy, I’d hate to get down and dirty with the Joomla’s PHP code. But, with help of a Joomla developer, I was able to bring up the Aya Takeo site in very short order and minimal cost.
So here’s what I’ve learned about Erlang. It’s a fine language, but not quite ready for guys like me who know just enough to shoot themselves in the foot. My hat is off to the Erlang developers posting increasingly interesting elements of Erlang-based web infrastructure. But until they get more community support and far better user documentation they’ll be sucking the fumes of the Joomlas, Drupals, and Djangos of the world.
There’s still far too big a gap between the fluency of human language and the brittle tyranny of Erlang code.
But when the day comes, and the gap is bridged, it will be Katy bar the door. I hope it comes soon.
