Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

I think it's unfair to explain how I "missed the point" to me when I'm the one who brought it to your attention in the first place, when I called it out explicitly as a weakness, in the context of a post explaining how OTP can not be completely ported into Go without loss. I did after all explain in a parenthetical that I tried to fix it, realized the fix wasn't really a fix, and decided just to go simple and idiomatic after that.

The thing is, while it is sad that we lose that characteristic of supervisors, there are still other useful characteristics: Sensible restarts; naive restart code has a lot of pathological cases. I rather expect my library to ship with a couple at first too, but we (yay open source) can fix it in one place, once. Composition of supervisors is a great way to build applications, with self-contained pieces; the whole "hierarchy" still applies, though I find with the elimination of the restart strategies it gets a lot simpler, for better and for worse. It's still nice to be able to build code and easily slot it into a management system, even if it can't quite be as powerful.

A complete translation is impossible, but an idiomatic one may be, and I'm already finding it useful even in my little coding efforts.

As for the REPL... yes, that is an unmitigated loss, no question. I'm mitigating it in my personal app with a lot more flexible logging and some more external controls, but there is no true replacement for a REPL. Though... we may get a REPL someday, it just may be either a mere subdialect of Go or a separate scripting language. I've resisted putting a dependency on one of the very young Go scripting languages in my project, but theoretically in another year or two this might at least be mitigated.

But

1) I don't currently do much that requires any of that.

2) I don't want to learn a completely different 'kind' of language just to hit one pain point.

3) Resources are quite limited (re the website, training, books)

4) and this is the biggee: I just don't want to do functional programming. Our Erlang booster? Want to know how much time he sometimes spent on mailing lists and such asking "how do you do X"? I mean for pretty basic stuff. I get the value of functional programming and immutability ("oh no you don't" you'll respond, but bear with me), but in the end it is too high a price to pay FOR ME. I work in imperative languages, I am comfortable in them, I can't get away from them (I need C++ for speed, for example), I'm just not going to take on a language that kicks my legs out from under me like that. Y'all can argue about the finer points of functional vs whatever, but I'll abstain. I'm interested in solving my problems, and the imperative model works very well for my brain and needs.

So, for me, an interesting toy. I'm 47 and don't have time to chase 'yet another language' which is all this is for me.

Now, if I was trying to solve issues like the ones that got Armstrong to write Erlang in the first place, perhaps I'd revisit it. But as it is? No. No time. Not enough return on the investment.

(It's not "C++ fast", of course.)