Erlang was created at Ericsson (a telecom company based in Stockholm, Sweden) in the 80s and released to the world in the 90s. It is used with "soft real-time" (where you can occasionally miss a deadline).
Two major drawbacks to Erlang are that it is hard to find people with Erlang experience and it can take several months for someone used to a language like Java to become proficient in Erlang.
It is Hard to Find People with Erlang Experience
Unlike C++, Java or C#, it is much harder to find people who have experience with Erlang. At Pearson in Denver, for example, we had to contract with a firm in Europe to get support for Ejabberd, a chat program written in Erlang.
When we tried to find new members for the team to support Prospero, we had to dispense with Erlang experience as a requirement because nobody had it.
Erlang is basically a niche language in this country, with few adherents.
It is Hard to Train People in Erlang
As a rule of thumb, it would take several months before a developer was "up to speed" with Erleng.
In learning Erlang, one had to learn a different style of development called Functional Programming. An important difference with Functional Programming is that there are no variables - so a statement like "i++" should not be supported in a functional language. This is very different from traditional (imperative) languages, and takes awhile to get used to.
Erlang syntax is also very different from the various "C-like" languages. For example, if expressions in Erlang cannot have function calls and are seldom used.
The difference in programming styles and syntax combine to make Erlang a difficult language to pick up.
Erlang also has Good Points
Erlang also has its good points like light weight processes. I once created a program that used several million threads (called processes in Erlang), but I couldn't do the same thing in Java. At several thousand threads the VM wanted more memory than the system had.
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