Comment by tombert

Ah, found the email he responded to a year later. As before, the stuff after the > is him quoting me.

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> Hello!

>> Just under a year ago I send you a message asking you about multi-process computing and the like. You gave me a long, detailed email that not only answered my questions, but also explained in pretty-decent detail. >

> I was so impressed by that email that I actually purchased your "Programming Erlang" book, and enjoyed that just as much, and today I started my first job doing Erlang full-time (well, mostly; there's some JS involved).

Great - thanks a lot for buying the book - these kind of stories make it feel all worth while

> I just wanted to thank you for the help. I know a compsci-celebrity probably gets bombarded with emails,

Actually not - I guess it's a 'being polite' thing - I rather like twitter it lowers the entry barrier for communication between people.

I have in the past mailed several of my CS "heros" - and was always rather reluctant to do so. Then to my great surprise I often got long and helpful replies (from Niklaus Wirth, Alan Kay, Jim Gray)

This kind of fits in with my view of life - 95% of people are basically helpful.

I've always thought that converts were gained "one at a time" - imagine a drip drip drip of water falling into a pan - one day it overflows.

We always think it's fantastic to hear the stories of what you guys do with Erlang. (I say we because the Erlang you're using is the product of many people fantastic work) - I'm just the fall guy who writes the books and happened to start it all :-)

I was sat listening to Brian Acton who founded WhatsApp and made 3.5B$ and thought "I invented this crap" - which is a great feeling - and they gave me a tee-shirt.

So the side effect of what I do is I get to meet loads of interesting people and do what I want.

Anyway thank again, and I hope things go well for you.

> and I think it's really cool that you took a good amount of time responding to some random guy on the internet asking for help.

Well every body is a random guy until you share stories.

My wife was a random woman before we met.

Anyway life would be very boring if it were not for random events.

I never run for busses or trains - it was after I read about a guy who missed a train and had a random conversation with a guy on the platform who had also missed the train - this gave them an idea that they turned in a multi-million dollar business.

I guess the other reason that you get long replies is that I'm an author and I don't do short mails.

> As usual, keep up the great work.

I'm trying - though I've recently retired - gives me more time for hobby programming - though I have to tend my garden and so on

Cheers

/Joe