Well, personally I'd like to have some kind of namespace and do not have to prepend a personal string in front of every module I write (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm a newbie in Erlang).
Until a little while ago the website http://www.erlang.org looked old from any angle (I like the new design), but the documentation at http://www.erlang.org/doc/ feels really ancient. I know that the content is up-to-date, but at a first visit it seems like the documentation of a language that is not maintained (which is false). I think that when people start to learn something they want to either fill that they're learning something futuristic or that they're learning to build on the shoulders of giants; that page transmit me that the world has moved on and nobody cared to update the page.
For namespacing, Erlang used to have packages to provide something a bit like that: http://www.erlang.se/publications/packages.html They ended up being rarely used, and were eventually stripped out of the system as they ended up confusing regulars more than anything.
The issue with trying to add namespacing to Erlang is that people think of namespacing modules, but they forget about the other global namespaces: process names, ETS table names, and so on. They'd need to be done all at once, or otherwise they risk giving you inconsistent results. For example say I namespace myapp.mymodule.erl, and inside of this I contact the process named 'mymodule' and the table also named 'mymodule'. If I'm not careful and pass that name around, will it still refer to a global namespace (which can clash), or will it now refer to a different process and table in another namespace?
Fixing this requires changing a lot about the language, I think, and it's probably a far bigger challenge than it looks.
Erlang may need better marketing, but as a person from the community, I'd like to hear what I could do. "Just do it better" is hard to build on, I guess. It's reminiscent of "make the logo pop more" for designers.
I was talking about the impressions that the official site gives to non expert.
> Erlang may need better marketing, but as a person from the community, I'd like to hear what I could do. "Just do it better" is hard to build on, I guess. It's reminiscent of "make the logo pop more" for designers.
Didn't notice that my suggestions were so vague, sorry. I'd say
- avoid all the empty pages like http://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/mnesia/index.html or http://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/odbc/index.html
- remove the folders icons and use something else, or at least update the icons
- clearly separate functions, either having more empty space between each one of them or using subtle colors or lines or whatever
- use different text styles for functions and arguments or some sort of syntax highliting
That said I'm not a designer, I'd ask one for help.
Until a little while ago the website http://www.erlang.org looked old from any angle (I like the new design), but the documentation at http://www.erlang.org/doc/ feels really ancient. I know that the content is up-to-date, but at a first visit it seems like the documentation of a language that is not maintained (which is false). I think that when people start to learn something they want to either fill that they're learning something futuristic or that they're learning to build on the shoulders of giants; that page transmit me that the world has moved on and nobody cared to update the page.
Erlang just needs better marketing.