One of the most balanced, insightful and respectful critiques I've read on the topic. Brightened up my day reading it. Thanks.
I've stated previously I'm an Erlang fan, for several of the reasons you've highlighted. I similarly don't believe it's a "global maxima".
Perhaps the most saddening observation is the number of languages that have come after Erlang - intended for server-type loads - that haven't learned from and built on its strengths in concurrency and fault tolerance.
I remember a separate discussion between Joe Armstrong and Alan Kay[0] where Kay posed the wonderful question (paraphrasing): "what comes next that builds on Erlang?"
That's a tempting prospect. My personal wish list would include 1st class dataflow semantics and a contemporary static type system and compiler that's as practically useful as Elm's today.
The key point is to build on what's been proven to work well, not throw it away and have to re-learn all the mistakes from scratch again.
I've stated previously I'm an Erlang fan, for several of the reasons you've highlighted. I similarly don't believe it's a "global maxima".
Perhaps the most saddening observation is the number of languages that have come after Erlang - intended for server-type loads - that haven't learned from and built on its strengths in concurrency and fault tolerance.
I remember a separate discussion between Joe Armstrong and Alan Kay[0] where Kay posed the wonderful question (paraphrasing): "what comes next that builds on Erlang?"
That's a tempting prospect. My personal wish list would include 1st class dataflow semantics and a contemporary static type system and compiler that's as practically useful as Elm's today.
The key point is to build on what's been proven to work well, not throw it away and have to re-learn all the mistakes from scratch again.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhOHn9TClXY