Erlang at Basho, Five Years Later
It's a pity they didn't talk about Erlang's strengths and weaknesses in a bit more detail.<p>I like Erlang a lot, and pushed to use it in a project I'm working on - it is the right tool for the job in this case.<p>But programming languages aren't like hammers or saws.  You can do a ton of things with any one of them.  This particular project probably could have been made to work one way or the other with Java, Javascript, Tcl, Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Haskell or any number of other things.  And this is, in some ways, a problem for Erlang.  It's really, really good at a few things, ok at a number of things, but feels a bit spotty for other things where other languages have something in place.  At least that is my impression.