I guess if you wanted to be snippy, you could say that Erlang isn't good at doing something it wasn't specifically designed for, which isn't a great feature for a language.
I actually like Erlang, and have used it professionally, but have a feeling that it's just not going to be a language that's used too much outside of its sweet spot.
Erlang was designed for building scalable, highly available distributed systems. If it's not good at building other things, e.g. first person shooters, that's not a meaningful disadvantage.
you could say that Erlang isn't good at doing something it wasn't specifically designed for, which isn't a great feature for a language
To be fair, slowness of startup time would be a criticism of the stock Erlang runtime, rather than of the language itself. As projects like Squeak, Rubinius, and the official Java VM have shown, this sort of speed issue can improve independently of the language semantics.
"Dear Erlang I: X I like you. Really, I do. But until you can read lines of text out of a file and do basic pattern-matching against them acceptably fast (which most people would say is faster than Ruby), you're stuck in a niche; you're a thought experiment and a consciousness-raiser and an engineering showpiece, but you're not a general-purpose tool. Sorry."
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[ 1214 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadNow that's opinionated software.
I actually like Erlang, and have used it professionally, but have a feeling that it's just not going to be a language that's used too much outside of its sweet spot.
To be fair, slowness of startup time would be a criticism of the stock Erlang runtime, rather than of the language itself. As projects like Squeak, Rubinius, and the official Java VM have shown, this sort of speed issue can improve independently of the language semantics.
The runtime has a lot of really good features, too - it's solid, pretty fast, and is very well tested.
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/09/22/Erlang