zdmc23

"Now, if someone wants to prove the contrary, feel free to give me a bunch of money I wasn't expecting."

Sorry, you're just not that lucky!

Bah! There are plenty of people who think they have insight into a particular market when they release their product. Some of those people show "insight" in hindsight, but what about the others? Were they less insightful?

If twitter2.com takes off: you look like a genius; but if it flops, you just lacked insight?

I certainly agree that "tinkering around" can lead to amazing discoveries (e.g., penicillin, chemotheraphy) and/or great timing (e.g., pets.com)...

The reason why I posted the thread is because I've come across a lot of brilliant people who just so happen to be very "self-righteous." They assume that their intellect and sheer willpower will translate into entrepreneurial success...

Ok, then I have a follow-up: Do you think that what you do is more important than who you know?

Perhaps, but which is more important?

It seems more likely that someone could succeed by simply being lucky, than if they worked hard and never ran into the "right" person, found themselves at the "right" conference, been born into the "right" family or country or situation, etc...

I think that more people don't commit to Erlang because they're afraid that it's just "the cool thing" - for now. It seems like more and more people are becoming aware of the importance of learning at least one functional programming language, but perhaps aren't sure which to commit to. I personally was a bit torn: Erlang has some great features and is production tested, Clojure is Lisp-esque (kill two birds with one stone) and has access to the Java libraries, OCaml is blazing fast, Haskell seems to be the pick for the "eggheads" and has lazy evaluation (purists seem to gloat over this one), etc... I think it comes down to risk...

Why don't banks just open up their software offerings and give you an API to accept transactions?

According to http://erlang.org/download/, R6B & R7B were released around 2000 and 2001. If the eight myths were dispelled almost 10 years ago, then why bring them up again? Nevertheless, it's great to know that they don't exist!