Hi,
I think I disagree. Part of disruptive innovations, or worse is better, is that they often serve to open up a field to new entrants who couldn’t afford the previous technology for some reason. Think Tk and Tcl - instead of programming with X libs, you could write GUIs in a simple scripting language, even though it was far slower and in some ways less powerful than C.
I mention a few points about things that will impede the spread of Erlang in a recent post:
I think the key thing to consider is that it does 2 things (concurrency, distributed) head and shoulders above the competition right now, and a lot of other things not so well. The question is: can someone else do a decent implementation of those features before Erlang catches up in other areas? I don’t have the answer, and while I like Erlang a lot, and actually use it professionally, I think it’s anyone’s guess.
Posted by David N. Welton