Learning Erlang has been on my todo list for years now. I know Java because I was exposed to it in school and had to use if for work. I know Perl because I've h

Learning Erlang has been on my todo list for years now. I know Java because I was exposed to it in school and had to use if for work. I know Perl because I've had to use it for work. I know C because I've had to know it for projects and some work. I know javascript because I have to. I know Common Lisp and Clojure, because I want to. Erlang belongs in this category of languages that have really cool features but which almost nobody has to learn to do a certain job. Nearly everything you can do with Erlang you can do with something else and there are a lot of languages that are necessary for one purpose or another and can't be replaced with Erlang. This is usually because said language is so entrenched in a space that it doesn't make sense to use anything else. The end result is that programmers only have so much time and only so many projects that they can reasonably devote to their 'fun' language and there are a lot of those from which to choose. Erlang isn't competing with Java, it's competing with Lisp, Smalltalk, Factor, Haskell, OCaml, etc. That's a long list of competition.