>It's unlikely that an open source language is both "secret", and has oodles of libraries - things don't tend to work that way. That is true, but, at the same

>It's unlikely that an open source language is both "secret", and has oodles of libraries - things don't tend to work that way. That is true, but, at the same time, irrelevant. For example, at my company we do e-mail archiving. Does Erlang have any libraries to facilitate that? No. Not even close. But Apache Lucene does. So, what we do is use the Erlang OTP Java interface [1] to allow Erlang to handle the message passing and parallelization, while Lucene handles the actual indexing and search. The way I see it, Erlang makes it very easy to add a message passing layer on top of whatever single-threaded process you currently have. This allows you to scale your applications without having to muck about with their internals too much - you launch multiple instances of your existing single threaded code and use Erlang to handle all the messiness of message passing. I think that is what makes Erlang such a secret weapon. The fact that you can very easily add a message passing layer to anything with Erlang greatly simplifies the job of parallelizing existing programs. [1] http://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/jinterface/java/com/ericsson/otp/erlang/package-summary.html http://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/jinterface/java/com/ericsson/...