Why Erlang is the best concurrent language available

[Mikael Karlsson]

Thursday 23 Jan 2003  Luke Gorrie:
> Joe Armstrong <joe@REDACTED> writes:
> > On Thu, 23 Jan 2003, Mikael Karlsson wrote:
> > > Thursday 23 Jan 2003 11:04 Joe Armstrong wrote:
> > > >   Projects fail because the SW does  not work and *not* because the
> > > > SW was too slow -  remember this and you will have a  long and happy
> > > > life as a programmer.
> > >
> > > Ehhrm, so why do you show the Apache vs. Yaws comparison :-)
> > > http://www.sics.se/~joe/apachevsyaws.html
> >
> > Because yaws is faster than apache under conditions of load.
>
> But then, Klacke has implemented Yaws with maximum performance in mind
> from the beginning, using lots of fancy tricks. :-)
>
> -Luke

Simplicity, practicality, stability etc. is mentioned as why Erlang is the 
best concurrent language available. I agree. But the fact that it performs 
well or even excellent does not make things worse.
My point was, I think :-), that if you use Erlang in it's application domain 
(concurrency), you can focus on get things working. 
Performance is something that you get anyway, thanks Joe et. al. :-), so 
you can have a long and happy life as a programmer. 
This is not true for all other languages.

I think Yaws, let it be that it is tweaked and optimized by brilliant Erlang
programmers, actually points out the concurrent world of Web applications 
as a field were Erlang can be a killer app.
It seems that most Web application frameworks like jboss, tomcat, zope etc are 
built aroung Java (Python in Zope's case), and I am not so sure that 
performance may not be an issue when you want to add things like PKI/SSL, 
XML transforms, reverse proxying, ODBC connections etc. Especially if your
organisation do not afford the latest cluster of Enterprise Servers.

And if you get the things faster out of the door as well....

I would really like to see Erlang going in the directions of web
application/services, and not only remain as OTP, THE Telecom 
platform.

/Mikael