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The article is underselling Erlang's meteoric success. "Adoption was slow during the first few years." - After 5 years there was an international conference devoted to Erlang, a global community around it and the language enjoyed commercial success from the beginning.

It just goes to show that Erlang fills a real niche that is ill served by most other programming languages. Programming distributed systems remains painful in 2018 - not because there aren't any theoretical solutions to make it easier, but because there are astonishingly few practical systems that offer built-in support. Erlang is such a practical system and if you didn't already look into the language it is well worth your time to pick it up. :)