[jacquesm]

But with a huge barrier to entry. Smalltalk is at least reasonably easy to grasp for people new to programming, Erlang not so much (though it is incredibly powerful).

The graphical nature of the Smalltalk environment also really helped to make it accessible. Erlang lives mostly in text terminals.

I'm still not convinced of the 'image' mechanism, it's really nice to have implicit and automatic persistence but it glues the code so strongly to the data that it starts to hamper collaboration. Being able to easily pull a bunch of stuff from one machine to another and to integrate it with stuff that was already there is something that other programming languages have solved very well (together with DVCSs), Smalltalk seems a step backwards in that regard.

Though there are times I wished for an easy way to hibernate an entire session for later re-use.

[derefr]

> Erlang lives mostly in text terminals.

People (outside of Ericsson) just haven't bothered to take much advantage of Erlang's strengths. Erlang speaks network wire protocols very efficiently, so if you want graphical Erlang sessions, you just need to write Erlang applications that act as e.g. X11 clients. Which is what things like Erlang's own Observer application does, complete with the ability to use the graphics toolkit Tk. (Or, if you like, you could expose an HTTP server serving a web-app with live updates over a websocket, like https://github.com/shinyscorpion/wobserver. Or an VNC/RDP server. It's really all equivalent in the end.)

Unlike Smalltalk where the graphical capabilities are part of the local console framebuffer, Erlang's approach allows you to interact with a running Erlang node graphically irrespective of your locality to it—which is important, because, in the modern day, your software is very likely a daemon on a headless server/cloud somewhere.

[jacquesm]

After long searching I've settled on python for hardware control, number crunching and ML stuff (it's really just wrappers around C libraries and GPU kernels) and Erlang for everything else. So far no regrets. I wasn't aware of that software, thank you for the pointer!

[jfoutz]

I've never used it seriously, but the bit pattern pattern constructs look really sweet. I don't write a lot of protocol code anymore. But I remember doing parsing badly on 10-100 bytes to figure out what a message meant. Websocket stuff would get a lot of help from that syntax.

[defined]

> your software is very likely a daemon on a headless server/cloud somewhere

This is true of every Erlang system I have developed, so, I concur.

[goatlover]

Then this could work for Elixir as well, which seems to be a little more approachable for the majority of programmers.

[defined]

I dispute that Erlang has a huge barrier to entry. Although there is a larger barrier than for, say, Python or Ruby, I feel that Erlang gets an undeservedly bad rap, especially given the ROI.

I am no genius, but I was able circa 2008 to develop a significant production system in Erlang, while learning Erlang on the job over a period of 3-4 months. I had never programmed in a functional language before (C++ was my forte). In 2008, the tooling and environment surrounding Erlang was far less supportive than it is today, so the barrier now should be lower.

If you want to talk about a huge barrier to entry (for me, anyway), it's the Great Wall of Haskell. I found it a great deal harder to learn Haskell. I have only written one small utility in it and still don't claim to know the language. And that's after using Erlang for many years.

Also, these days, Elixir is reputed to lower whatever barrier to entry there is for Erlang.

[hvidgaard]

Haskell is less about the "language" and more about the mindset. You simply have to program in a very different way, and that is hard to rewire your brain to do this. Once you learn Haskell, you will program different in other languages as well, simply because you think differently.

[gkya]

> circa 2008 to develop a significant production system in Erlang

Is that whatsapp by any chance? ;)

[defined]

Not nearly that significant! I wish!