Erlang and open-source community

Great topic @Taure :023:

There was a discussion on the Elixir Forum some time ago about wanting to try and get an official library from a payment provider, and a few of us (including @lpil) felt it would be beneficial having these types of libraries in Erlang - because all BEAM languages could easily make use of them.

I think this makes a lot of sense because it means there would potentially be more people who could help maintain them (potentially anyone from any BEAM lang) and because these libraries could be used by all BEAM lang users it would mean that the potential userbase is greater, making it more attractive for large companies to provide official libraries. I think it’s also a nice way to support Erlang.

With regards to the more general Erlang/OS situation, I think a good and meaningful interop story would help Erlang (as well as all BEAM langs). We discussed some of this in What is Erlang's gateway application? - but in order to grow a language userbase I think you need a gateway into it - i.e. something that gives people a good reason to use it, and that is usually via a good framework or some other killer application. In Erlang’s case, a better BEAM interop story could mean it could benefit from all of the gateways of each BEAM language. And for BEAM lang users it could mean they could make use of the best that each BEAM lang has to offer.

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