Erlang looks interesting. However, the only problem I have with starting in Erlang is that on the great computer language shootout, it shows that Erlang is about 10x slower than C++ on most examples. And about 3x slower than Go [1] I know that the problems on this website are not specifically "concurrent" problems, but still, even a distributed web-server must do some non-concurrent stuff at times :) Are my concerns correct/justified?

[1] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?t...

Edit: even Haskell seems to be about 7x faster than Erlang (according to [1]). Suddenly, Haskell looks like a good candidate for writing a distributed server :) Can somebody comment on this?

When you say Erlang is slower than C++, You are right. It is also slower than Go.

Ruby is also slower than C++ & Go, But Ruby on Rails is not only popular but a very productive web framework which can help you build your app with a productivity that C++ or Go can't match.

When you write a high quality, fault tolerate system, the raw speed comes at the end. Erlang shines when you write a concurrent system plus its design is very unique. Erlang I would say isn't only a language but a whole philosophy of Software development. Once learned you can apply to many other platforms.

All in its a joy to work with functional languages and Erlang is perhaps the most commercially successful functional language.

> and Erlang is perhaps the most commercially successful functional language.

Out of interest, what makes you say that?

Looking at the TIOBE rankings (not that this is definitive), Erlang doesn't even make the top 20 languages, when F# and R do:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Is there a reason you think it's more successful in the commercial world?

(btw, I'm a fan of Erlang - unfortunately I don't get to use it on a regular basis; other than products built on it: RabbitMQ mainly)

Erlang is used in infrastructure projects. A few I know of:

Rabbitmq -- probably the most popular messaging system

Riak -- distributed, fault tolerant database

WhatsApp -- managed to route billions of messages a day with only a handful of engineers and servers.

Ericsson -- pretty much got the market for cell base nodes cornered. Chances are about 50% if you use internet on your smartphone, that Erlang will be involved.

Some firms on Wall Street use Erlang -- remember Serge Aleynikov case, he is an Erlang programmer.

Ejabberd -- a very popular XMPP server

CouchDB/Cloudant(IBM) -- another database and database-as-a-service company use Erlang.

So I would still say the original statement holds. By success might mean the amount of work being done not amount of people writing code. Think about WhatsApp. It was only 10-20 engineers that worked on the back-end yet think about the massive amounts of data they were able to handle.

His erlexec thing is quite useful: https://github.com/saleyn/erlexec - I started contributing to it myself before I realized who he was.