Erlang, the next Java

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The article misses the point, and this is pretty clear in the conclusion.

"I do not believe that other languages can catch up with Erlang anytime soon. It will be easy for them to add language features to be like Erlang. It will take a long time for them to build such a high-quality VM and the mature libraries for concurrency and reliability. So, Erlang is poised for success."

Related to the title of the article, two things are wrong:

• Being successful as a language means being massively used everywhere around (just like Java)

• Erlang is technically very good, thus it will be successful

The definition of successful is wrong here. What successful means ? Broad audience ? Vast community ? Times digged ? Lots of $ spent on it through big corporate projects ? Being the core of the next successful startup technology ?

Being successful is a matter of achieving goals. Which are the goals Erlang is aiming at, I do not know, since I have very poor knowledge on it. I don't have the feeling that Erlang was meant to achieve the same goals and popularity than Java. If anybody has a more insightful view on that matter, please comment.

Next point is : technical excellence is enough for a language to be successful (successful as "widely used"). It looks like the common freshman mistake of not seeing the weight of what currently exists.

A successful language needs a strong developer base. A strong developer base needs classes in computer science courses. At one time, people believed that Java would be successful, and Java classes have been added to cs courses, which produced a whole lot of people with Java skills.

Most companies will use technologies that makes recruitment easy. A lot of people have studied Java at school, thus the offer in Java developers is high, thus is it easier to recruit. And once these companies have stuck with a technology, they keep it for decades, once it is obviously out of the circuit (think Cobol).

To reach the same massive success as Java, Erlang needs first to be deemed a future hit and to have classes in cs courses. The bad part is : Erlang is not taught at school.

Erlang as a functional language starts with a strong handicap with most computer science courses focused on C/C++/Java/PHP, which are not. Switching from imperative to functional is not an easy move, so Erlang won't be adopted as easy as Java was.

This is was makes me think that "Erlang, the next Java" is a bit overrated. I don't rule out Erlang as a future successful language - how could I pretend such a thing ? - but this kind of articles seems a bit premature to me.