Disruptive Innovation (Worse is Better)
<p>I had read your post and forgot to link to it on the <a href="http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/09/22/erlang">system language</a> vs scripting, sorry about that.</p>
<p>Re: the character of a guess, it is a bet, of course. This is the reason why a linked to Sam Ruby&#8217;s <em>Long bets</em>. Erlang is significant in a couple of areas there:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.process-one.net/en/ejabberd/">ejabberd</a> is one of the dominants <b>XMPP</b> servers, and it is written in erlang. In fact this is what turned me into an erlang user, more than one year ago. I even needed to debug a build problem that crashed it, my first ever contact with erlang.</li>
<li><a href="http://couchdb.org/CouchDB/CouchDBWeb.nsf/Home?OpenForm">CouchDB</a> is also written in erlang, and it is an interesting implementation of a non-relational Document Base suitable for <b>map/reduce</b> type of computation.</li>
<li>Erlang itself, being a functional, distributed language, is very suitable for map/reduce style computations, as <a href="http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2007/09/23/tim-bray-and-erlang/">Steve Vinoski</a> remembers when turning inside out the log processing task coming from Tim Bray.</li>
</ul>

<p>Erlang is then at the intersection of two core technologies for Sam. It is already serving&#160; me well, as I&#8217;ve never seen it give a single problem beyond the build issues (builtin vs dynlinked zlib in openssl). And the more I know about it the more I like it.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m not sure if it will be <b>the</b> Holy Grail of the next years, of course.</p>
Posted by <a href="http://memojo.com/~sgala/blog/" title="marlow.memojo.com">Santiago Gala</a>