I don't know exactly what you mean by "small/hobbyist developers". Yeah, Erlang really shines for high-availability, high concurrency network and distributed s

I don't know exactly what you mean by "small/hobbyist developers". Yeah, Erlang really shines for high-availability, high concurrency network and distributed systems stuff, which it was designed for, but many of the properties that make it successful in that area are useful elsewhere as well. First, obviously, a great deal of web and database stuff is network programming and distributed systems when you get down to it so web servers, proxies, websockets, messaging, etc are all well within Erlang's domain. Here's a demo of someone using Erlang as firmware for a Drone, doing hot code-swapping while it's in the air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96UzSHyp0F8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96UzSHyp0F8 Erlang's bit packing/unpacking syntax (http://www.erlang.org/doc/programming_examples/bit_syntax.html http://www.erlang.org/doc/programming_examples/bit_syntax.ht...) is really nice to work with. It came out of a need to handle binary wire protocols, but it means that it can also be nice for any kind of binary file format parsing that you might need to do. ErlangOnXen (http://erlangonxen.org/ http://erlangonxen.org/) is really interesting if you are into operating systems and virtualization stuff. Erlang's not very focused on heavy numeric processing so you don't see it much in science domains, but the actor model that it's built on maps well to Agent Based Modeling: http://www.research.ucf.edu/Swarmfest/Program_Day2/Gene%20Sher_FINAL_ABM_Using_Erlang.pdf http://www.research.ucf.edu/Swarmfest/Program_Day2/Gene%20Sh...