In my opinion, there are three main issues: 1) The Language actually is not general purposes. Or at least it is not promoted this way. If you really need Actor

In my opinion, there are three main issues: 1) The Language actually is not general purposes. Or at least it is not promoted this way. If you really need Actor based model and lightweight threads, you can choose Scala/Akka, that is also well suitable for a wide range of different objectives. 2) Standard library(I mean OTP) is simply ugly. 3) Language's syntax is ugly too. Pascal again? No, thanks. :) I know there is Elixir that fixes most of the issues, but too few people know about it outside of the Erlang community. When someone mention Erlang he/she probably thinks about "vanilla" Erlang, which is ugly again. P.S. I had been using Erlang for a while and then stopped.