My belief has been that it comes from Erlang’s history and is slowly getting better thanks to Hex, the Elixir community involvement, companies evolving their approach to open source and the changes in types of companies using Erlang – the story is that companies like fortune 500’s use Erlang but don’t tell anyone and don’t participate in the community, this is definitely partly true but I don’t know how true it is still today.
Joe Armstrong once asked Fred and me why he’d use rebar3. He didn’t have any outside dependencies and any dependencies used in production projects at Ericsson had to be backed up and stored in a fallout vault.
I’ve felt this approach to implementing specialized solutions to your problems that don’t do anymore or less than what you need has been common with Erlang. Being a high level language this can work out just fine and not be a major waste of time.
There have been many attempts at package managers (I won’t repeat it here, but wrote about it in Adopting Erlang, Dependencies | Adopting Erlang) and it finally feels like we have moved passed that issue with Hex.
I kind of started this topic because I feel that things could be more shared. I know I haven’t been the best. But lately I think with slack, forums and others Erlang community could help each other and share tools and libraries.
I really like rebar3, pgo and other tools. But I get a bit sad when companies that have erlang want to abandon Erlang because Elixir have a better community. Instead of maybe support back and share tools and libraries and get help.
I always remember Freds talk about Erlang because it is so true how slow Erlang go forward, in good and in bad. But I think the community now is in a state where we faster could help and share knowledge.
I’m not sure what would constitute an Erlang open-source community exactly (maybe it’s a sub-set of the following) but theres definitely an Erlang community - and I would say it’s made up of anyone who’s positively interested in Erlang and wants to interact with, support, and welcome others into it - and all in a sincere, kind and thoughtful way. Together, these people form the community
People can also be users of something but they don’t have to be a part of ‘the community’ if they don’t want to be, but generally anyone who is a positive force and adds something of value can, and are usually welcomed with open arms too
Obviously this is in the most simplest of terms but you get the idea
Absolutely! I am hoping this forum can help, and I’m already enjoying seeing so many Erlangers come together and talk about community orientated things - just like you are in this thread, and others like this one and this one and this one and this one (and we’ve only been live something like 10 days!! ).
I think the future of the Erlang community is looking bright - and it’s all thanks to fantastic people like you all pushing it forward
).