If you make something and nobody knows about it, did you actually make it?

Richard Hamming, May 1986: you should spend at least as much time in the polish and presentation as you did in the original research. Now at least 50% of the time must go for the presentation. It's a big, big number.

>If you make something and nobody knows about it, did you actually make it?

Of course I did. You seem to be confusing things that you use for things that you are trying to sell (e.g. if you are an an academic, you want to sell your research as valid and worthwhile.) I use tools that I built to do work, and I've never spent a moment trying to sell the tools, but I actually made them. Some things in this world aren't even open source - people use them to make money, and never reveal them to anyone. Erlang started as an internal project, and people had to bargain to get it released externally.

You're drawing a false equivalence between marketing and substance. Erlang is doing billions of dollars of business. I love to talk about it, but the fewer people that know it, the better for me professionally. People have no idea how easy it makes everything.