[erlang-questions] Erlang is the best choice for building commercial application servers

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 13/03/2012, at 5:10 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> The important part is "in the business of selling software."  The critical business consideration, when selecting infrastructure, is the level of continued support you can expect.  IBM is going to be around for a while, so is Microsoft.  If you prefer vendor independence, you can be pretty confident that C is going to be supported by someone, so is Apache.

"Company <X> is going to be around for a while" is misleading.

IBM is still around, but they abandoned their Pascal compiler a long time ago,
long before other companies did.
IBM is still around, but Lisp/370 (or Lisp/VM) isn't.
IBM is still around, but IBM Prolog doesn't seem to be.
IBM is still around, but they sold off their Smalltalk unit.

HP is still around, but Compaq Visual Fortran for Windows is not.

Microsoft is still around, but they dropped their Fortran compiler a long time ago.
Microsoft is still around, but they dropped Visual Basic for Applications from
 the Macintosh port of Office several years ago, and while it had been pretty bad
 having to use VBA, it was even worse NOT being able to use it.
Microsoft is still around, but they sold MS-Test to Rational who renamed it to
 Rational Visual Test; they got bought by IBM; I _think_ it's now SQABasic

One of my colleagues is really keen on Rational Purify.  It's still around,
but if you look up the Windows support, it's "Intel IA-32" only, even under
Windows 7.  No 64-bit Windows.  64-bit Linux, yes.  But if you are a
Windows developer, Purify has moved away from you by standing still.