I think clojure tells a useful story here. Rigid approach, unfamiliar syntax for a lot of developers, and unusual semantics make it a really strange choice. And

I think clojure tells a useful story here. Rigid approach, unfamiliar syntax for a lot of developers, and unusual semantics make it a really strange choice. And it never has been popular compared to big languages. But a lot of companies are institutionally committed to the jvm, and/or have deep expertise within it, and a lot of those have smaller teams or individuals with more freedom to experiment with their tools. And now clojure has settled into a comfortable niche as the language you use when you should be using java but just don't wanna. This is one path to making it easier for devs to justify using a new language. And I mean, typescript was in this situation more or less at one point. So sure erlang isn't as popular as java or javascript, but it is a runtime that some places are committed to and have expertise in. I could see gleam latching onto that, maybe.