"Do you really decide whether you'd learn a language by looking at its website?" Kind of! Irrespective of Erlang's site, a well-maintained, informative, and ne

"Do you really decide whether you'd learn a language by looking at its website?" Kind of! Irrespective of Erlang's site, a well-maintained, informative, and newbie friendly website is often a signal. Maybe it's not a very accurate signal. But it's a signal which suggests that, for lack of a better term, the community exists and has its act together. There are enough other things to occupy programmers' time. People adopt heuristics like these — "how professional/modern does the website look?" — as a way to save time.