New Year 2010 Learn something new every Year

The programmers creed is to "learn a new programming language every year". My personal motto is to "learn a new progamming laguage via a CMS". This because I am a web programmer and like game programmers web programmers have a preferance for a particular development environment. We like to see things running on a web server with lots of users. In my recent contact with Erlang as my next language of choice I have spent a good deal of time using Yaws. While Yaws is a good learning environment for Erlang it does not have a CMS as part of its example package. There is also the problem of Erlang developers using mnesia for the most part and a few jumping on the CouchDB train. While these dbs are okay they are not RDMS and not really suitable for typical web work. So for the last 6 months I have been playing with Erlang while waiting for someone to with more knowledge about Erlang to build a simple and reliable CMS in Eelang using MySQL as a database back end.

This is where Zotonic comes into play. Today on Christmas eve I found Zotonic, a CMS built on Erlang that uses Postgresql as a database. Cool! Perfect! and needed. A nice present for those that want to learn a parallel, functional language like Erlang in a web development situation. I think that Zotonic will be a good change and nice addition to PHP and Drupal. I like the open source Apache 2.0 licensing also. It's just a gut feeling but I think that Zotonic may be the next big CMS to break through and might be the software that pushes Erlang into the limelight as a popular web programming language. Even if they do not I am still putting my chips on the table and giving them all of 2010.