Erlang is the future, and the past of concurrency. Any developer worth their salt really should be learning it. If you will take a bit of time to do so, you'll discover that rather than the incomprehensible scary pain you expect when you first see it, it is quite logical, and quite a joy to work with.<p>In fact, it is a litmus test for me. When I first started looking at NoSQL solutions, I quickly heard of MongoDB. When I found out it was written in C, I suspected that it wouldn't be distributed and it wouldn't be concurrent... and in researching further, those suspicions came true. (by "distributed" I mean, homogeneously like Riak, not the brittle master-server-sharding setup.)<p>Trying to write a truly distributed, concurrent application in C is an exercise in frustration-- you'll have to produce halfway done poor implementation of erlang to do it, or you'll deal with pain every single day.<p>But if you start with erlang, you get these features essentially for free. Plus a couple decades of seriously engineered OTP to go with it.<p>I know a lot of "developers" these days never use anything more .... intense.... than a scripting language. But if you're ready to dive into the deep end, it isn't replicating the experience of writing assembly in C, it is going towards the future-- erlang.