[lifeisstillgood]

Can I rephrase slightly (and take the odd strawman liberty)

The "mainstream" has been relying on incremental improvements for decades, and in doing so avoided rewriting legacy code until last possible moment

Some people have taken concurrency upfront and anecdotally seen cost / performance benefits plus more modern codebases and have anecdotally enjoyed competitive advantages in areas where concurrency makes a difference

We will never see the average, user interface bother with concurrency and legacy rewrites because the competitive advantages are low.

There are likely to be areas where the concurrency advantage is great enough - if you like erlang look for those niches

[InclinedPlane]

Yes, precisely.

It's like designing a race car, or a fighter jet. Sure, they are amazing things. But are people ever going to commute to work in anything resembling a Bugatti Veyron or an F-22? Of course not. Neither maximum automotive performance nor air combat effectiveness are the sorts of things that are normally necessary to optimize for in daily life. Some time in the far future we're going to have both the tools to write amazingly efficient programs and to do so with a minimal amount of fuss from the programmer's perspective, but it'll be a long time getting there. And in the meantime there are going to be plenty of cycles of figuring out how to produce performance gains with the least disruption to existing ways of doing things.

[lifeisstillgood]

Puuuuhhhleeeeaaaseeee can I commute to work in a Bugatti Veyron??

Please please please :-)

Edit: sorry unable to resist. However I am on Joe Armstrongs side - I would far rather make a decent living doing fun Erlang work than be in a java shop making the next generation of POS

Added to that I think not using Erlang or some STM based concurrency language must be an informed decision - if the CTO of big bank says we have tried two pilot projects rewriting the ATM network in Erlang and the projected costs do not add up, fine. If he says "I have two hundred java coders, we aren't moving". I don't think that's valid

[InclinedPlane]

Of course, most people would like to be working on race cars, or spacecraft, or fighter jets, but that just isn't an option for every body. And it's not as though there's no in between. The choice isn't just between some soul sucking blub-job in the enterprise trenches or using Erlang, there are lots of languages, lots of development patterns, lots of products.

[lifeisstillgood]

I would agree, but with the proviso that the spectrum between soul-sucking and cool-space-tech is not a nice linear graph - in my experience its step-gradients, some companies are entirely on one level, and then they have to make a real effort to climb to the next (i.e. From manual deploys to CI)

Its actually a consultancy opportunity (I hope :-0)