This isn't really a story about a sticker (surprise, surprise), but it really exists & its on the top cover - here's the proof:

Whoooa, it's Erlang. Not GitHub/Akka/F#/AngularJS/OculusRift/Spark/Clojure/Heroku/Swift/Elixir or any other most fresh of the freshest Internet-era web-scale sexy thing. Bah, quite the contrary - it's a freakin' programming language straight from 80s.

Did it have a massive overhaul recently? Did they adapt it for iOS? Or maybe someone has released an overhyped & ultraopinionated web framework based on that? Does it even run on YARN?

No. No-no-no-no-no.

Why this sticker then? Just to keep people asking? :) No, I had my reasons:

  1. To indicate that a good stuff is a good stuff, regardless of when it was created. Erlang solves some real problems in a way that works today as well as it did in 80s. And you don't need any fancy-pancy new framework for that - many of them just ape what was done by Ericsson engineers decades ago. The way Erlang:

    • enables distributed processing
    • excels in error-handling
    • implements hot-loading
    • synergizes all above to provide crazy availability levels

    is as impressive today as it was 15, 10, 5 years before (except the fact that it is continuously getting better & better).

  2. To honour its creators & maintainers who have chosen opening the technology (which was closed & proprietary originally), instead of concreting it in its own, closed bunker (Big Blue, I refer to you ...). I don't just mean open-sourcing Erlang, but also active efforts in reviving the community & growing the Erlang (both profit & non-that-direct-profit) app / library ecosystem.

For me this is absolutely impressive - this platform, devoid of support from a company like Microsoft, Oracle or Google is as good as it never was - still continues to grow & expand its popularity. Relies on passionate & dedicated community, full transparency & top-notch engineering design quality - and still shines.

Ladies & gentlemen, you have my respect. And the purpose of this sticker is to remind me about it every day.

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