So, it's probably not any sort of technological issue--I'm pretty impressed by the tech behind Erlang. It's the language (somewhat Prolog-ish) that is weird an

So, it's probably not any sort of technological issue--I'm pretty impressed by the tech behind Erlang. It's the language (somewhat Prolog-ish) that is weird and uncomfortable to people new to it. Elixir helps with this, but still, every time I've tried to pick up Erlang I've rapidly been turned off. It's the community--rather, the lack of one. Right now the product I'm working on pretty much plays directly to the strongpoints of Erlang: high-availability, high-scalability, soft-realtime performance, and straightforward error handling. Should be an obvious play. But, I can't find Erlang developers where I live--which is funny, because at least one company with a good exit in town is an Erlang shop. Maybe we'd be better off trying to open a branch somewhere in Europe to poach ex Ericcson folks. :( EDIT: More thoughts. Prototyping is just a hell of a lot faster in JS/Ruby than in Erlang, though this could be a side-effect of it being a lower-level language more suited to infrastructure stuff. Then again, I've seen at least one 3D modeling package written in it ( Wings3D ). Maybe that's part of the problem: just what the hell is Erlang good for? I see it used for really hardcore systems stuff, but it also seems to want to serve web pages, and draw 3D objects, and orchestrate builds, and all these other things. It doesn't seem to have a clean focus in the public eye right now.