I'm surprised Erlang isn't used more often. Out of the box it seems to solve a lot of the hard scaling problems many business face now. Maybe it's just too exotic.<p>I wonder if they could have been as successful with Scala + Akka. They mention a desire for at least limited static typing at the end of the slides. In my experience well-defined, statically typed interface declarations can eliminate a lot of dumb bugs.
A good background to Erlang is Armstrong's thesis, it really reads like a popular book <a href="http://www.erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf</a>. He discusses many of the points raised in the slides.
Nice write up.<p>Apparently the consensus is that Erlang is amazing for 'lower-level' infrastructure code but not so great for high-level business code. I wonder if Reia and Elxir might play a role in changing that...
Erlang is also used to power Facebook-style social games at Wooga: <a href="http://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/London2011/speakers/KnutNesheim" rel="nofollow">http://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/London2011/speakers...</a>
I thought they implemented game network code, scalably. <i>That</i> would be cool. So I was a little bit disappointed when read that they only keep stats using Erlang.<p>Other than that, that's pretty interesting.