I don't follow your reasoning here: why would the badness of an application propagate up to the technology it's based on? Even the best systems in the world can

I don't follow your reasoning here: why would the badness of an application propagate up to the technology it's based on? Even the best systems in the world can be abused. I can understand it working the other way around, e.g. an application initially seems good, but opinion of it drops when finding out it's written in COBOL. I can understand if the CouchDB authors agreed with criticism of their application, and explained them as being inherent to the language. AFAIK they haven't. EDIT: Ah, looks like the author wrote CouchDB! I can understand if Erlang and its proponents held CouchDB up as a shining example of their philosophy. AFAIK they don't (e.g. it doesn't appear on https://www.erlang.org/community https://www.erlang.org/community ).