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I mentioned in a comment below that a startup I worked for previously used Erlang. It was a giant headache. They initially used Mnesia as a database but it had

I mentioned in a comment below that a startup I worked for previously used Erlang. It was a giant headache. They initially used Mnesia as a database but it had issues (which I don't recall because it was before I joined). Then they switched to Riak which is written in Erlang, but was unstable at the time. They then used decided to use MySQL and Cassandra, but ran into issues because database drivers were contributed by the community and not updated. Also, It's basically impossible to hire someone who is an erlang expert, meaning everyone has new to erlang. Because of these and similar issues the company constantly had outages, despite using Erlang which is supposedly highly reliable.

namelosw 6y ago
I agree with you that Erlang usually is not in the category of 'boring' technology. It's pretty risky for most teams. Despite Erlang was old, those ideas are both alien and novel to most people. The idioms, the patterns, and the architectures are not well explored as mainstream languages. In my personal experiences, there are also many rough edges. With that being said, the example I raised just to illustrate that the WhatsApp founders had deep understandings of Erlang despite it was a niche technology. The same applies to FreeBSD. Those are the so-called 'boring' technologies for them.