Presentation: Tweet"Erlang and the Chasm"

Many wonderful technologies show great potential but never really become mainstream. As an example of how this plays out for a specific technology this talk will look at the status of Erlang using the technology lifecycle lenses of Geofrey More and in particular discuss if Erlang is before, in or after the Chasm.

The take aways are not specific to Erlang in any way, so this talk could probably be done talking about technology X, but it makes more sense to talk about technology management and evolution by looking at a case study.

Erlang as a technology has a lot of wonderful features and it allows you to create high quality software using but a third of the effort required to develop the same thing in other technologies. Erlang fits multi-core and cloud settings very well in addition to being a very good fit for agile development.

With all those things going for it, why is Erlang not the fastest growing language of them all?

In order to make the exploration meaningful we will have a look at the different key strengths of Erlang and see what they mean for people at the managerial, architect and developer levels. With that in place we will look at the shortcommings of Erlang and its eco-system in order to get a feel for what lies ahead.