Ulf Wiger

Simon: “If a boat is sinking with 100 people on board and you scatter some life belts in the region, then they’ll probably swim and cling on to them, right? Just because life belts float. So functional programming is good stuff, right, and is like this granite, then we’ll end up with people clinging on to it.”
Joe: “But … granite sinks.”
Simon: “Uuhm, what sinks?”
Joe: “Granite – sinks”
Simon: “…So I shouldn’t mix metaphors!”

Judging by the visitor statistics for erlang.org (as of 1 April 2008), the Erlang community seems to be doing well.

(Thanks, Bjarne Däcker, for producing the graphs).