Erlang is great, but for me, its problems simply outweigh its benefits.
For example, not every app has a need for Erlang's massive parallelism. I can't write desktop or iOS apps in Erlang. Small utility scripts are cumbersome. There seems to be no kind of strong graphics or game support for it. For web apps the lackluster performance means is not really a step up from Ruby, which I currently use, so in that area there is no reason for me to switch.
In fact, the only area where Erlang is really perfectly suitable is in developing fault-tolerant, concurrent, parallel, distributed systems. And yet when I do need to write such a system, I look to Go instead.
> Don't those [commas and periods] make more sense though?
No, they really are a bad choice. First, any kind of statement terminator/separator should be unnecessary, as I have argued elsewhere. Secondly, distinguishing between two types of terminators is a bad idea because it makes editing harder. If I have
A,
B.
and I want to switch the order to:
B,
A.
then I can't just use my editor's nifty line-transposing mechanism. I have to edit each line and change the "," into a "." and vice versa. It's incredibly badly thought out.
Really, I like Erlang, but whenever its syntax is discussed, its defenders come out of the woodwork to make arguments without ever really wanting to listen. Syntax does matter. From speaking to lots of people, I know that Erlang's antique and cantankerous syntax is the number one problem preventing people from adopting it. As long as erlangers do nothing about their syntax, it will remain a weird little language that people admire but don't use.
Just look at Elixir -- people actually get excited about it. Because it has a nice syntax.
> few languages rival Erlang's pattern matching
Erlang's pattern matching is cool, but its reliance on ordered lists (which it calls tuples even though the fields are unnamed) makes it less cool again. I vastly prefer Haskell's pattern matching and overall approach to typing.
For example, not every app has a need for Erlang's massive parallelism. I can't write desktop or iOS apps in Erlang. Small utility scripts are cumbersome. There seems to be no kind of strong graphics or game support for it. For web apps the lackluster performance means is not really a step up from Ruby, which I currently use, so in that area there is no reason for me to switch.
In fact, the only area where Erlang is really perfectly suitable is in developing fault-tolerant, concurrent, parallel, distributed systems. And yet when I do need to write such a system, I look to Go instead.
> Don't those [commas and periods] make more sense though?
No, they really are a bad choice. First, any kind of statement terminator/separator should be unnecessary, as I have argued elsewhere. Secondly, distinguishing between two types of terminators is a bad idea because it makes editing harder. If I have
and I want to switch the order to: then I can't just use my editor's nifty line-transposing mechanism. I have to edit each line and change the "," into a "." and vice versa. It's incredibly badly thought out.Really, I like Erlang, but whenever its syntax is discussed, its defenders come out of the woodwork to make arguments without ever really wanting to listen. Syntax does matter. From speaking to lots of people, I know that Erlang's antique and cantankerous syntax is the number one problem preventing people from adopting it. As long as erlangers do nothing about their syntax, it will remain a weird little language that people admire but don't use.
Just look at Elixir -- people actually get excited about it. Because it has a nice syntax.
> few languages rival Erlang's pattern matching
Erlang's pattern matching is cool, but its reliance on ordered lists (which it calls tuples even though the fields are unnamed) makes it less cool again. I vastly prefer Haskell's pattern matching and overall approach to typing.