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> Erlang generated a lot of buzz several years ago but aside from the recent success of WhatsApp it never quite stuck. Erlang is quietly running a lot of stuff
by dwc 10y ago
> Erlang generated a lot of buzz several years ago but aside from the recent success of WhatsApp it never quite stuck.
Erlang is quietly running a lot of stuff out there. It's almost certainly running some bits of infrastructure that you use daily, or in a supporting role for it. People who are not old Erlang hackers are picking it for new projects.
Erlang hasn't been and probably will never be quite mainstream, but to say it "hasn't stuck" might be missing the point: it's a mature and performant language that has some very nice standard features in OTP that are lacking or less mature in other languages. If your problem domain is smack in the middle of Erlang's strong points then it's worth considering. It's not going away any time soon.
- flocial 10y agoI see your point and yes I know that Erlang has decades of production use and shines in lots of infrastructure applications, game servers, etc. I was mainly referring to the buzz generated quite a few years ago when the first Pragmatic Programmer books on Erlang came out. There were a lot of startups testing the waters with Erlang but I just got the impression that the language didn't quite take off despite the merits touted about Erlang's strength as a functional language and the built-in handling of concurrency. This is all of course compared to the current buzz surrounding Elixir/Phoenix. I didn't intend to dismiss Erlang's amazing track record and applications to the domains where it continues to shine. This is roughly the time span I was referring to when I said "buzz": https://hn.algolia.com/?query=erlang&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=custom&type=story&dateStart=1104537600&dateEnd=1262390400 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=erlang&sort=byPopularity&prefi...