Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?

There is no good reason that I have encountered yet where I need to use it. Generally I think people try to use the tools they have at their disposal to solve a problem. I have python, and I can do most things in python. It's not always efficient, and as an example, when I first started using python, I blindly used urllib without thinking about it. The requests library has been getting momentum recently, and I found that I prefer it and that it simplifies some of what I do, but at the end of the day why would I have searched for an alternative if what I had was working?

As developers we have to value our time. In an ideal world we would learn everything there was to know about every programming language, and pick the appropriate language for each project. In reality we stop to think that a language is capable of achieving a task, and if it is, we don't look any further.

Ironically, the reason so many people use c/java/python/ruby is because so many people use c/java/python/ruby.

I think it's similar to the reason why DSP's aren't very popular compared to general-purpose CPUs for most tasks. It's a very specialized tool, designed to solve a very specialized problem. If you don't have that problem, it's not a practical choice because it's more difficult to use and often ill-suited to more common problems. I'm sure plenty of others have mentioned strings already.

Even if you do have that problem, but only a little bit, it might not be a practical choice. There are a lot of tasks where a DSP might perform better but a general-purpose CPU's still preferable because it's good enough, and the skills necessary to work with one are more common. The story's similar for choice of programming language in many applications that require concurrency and fault tolerance, but not to any particularly great extent.

i.e. showing him how his thought was wrong doesn't change the fact that many other people will probably make a similar thoughts.

Nor does it hurt. It only provides something for people to point to while they say "look, people are talking about something I am not interested in, therefore haskell is too hard and I shouldn't bother trying".

>And I've watched many, many discussions about Haskell go into deep arguments about category theory

You are not required to participate in any discussions you don't want to participate in.

>I want to write a program

So do it? The whole point of my post is that it is perfectly simple to do so. If a non-programmer can teach herself haskell and be productive with it, there's no reason a programmer can't.