Joe Armstrong on Erlang

You can actually get the feeling from day one that Erlang is not the commont type of language to write your programs in. A year ago when I begin in getting into Programming Languages and learnt how to code in a language called Clojure, which is a huge recommendation and in my opinion one of the game changers of our time, I got something down to earth: not everything has actually steered in the right direction. What I mean is that, even though many popular languages, like Java, have grown for more than twenty years, it doesn't really mean that it has grown in the right direction. This new breed of languages like Clojure and Erlang have actually born from day one with the idea of solving problems of our time. The thing is, even though the ideas that this languages are built upon are ideas that were actually though may decades ago, they seem so alien. They are not easy to understand computing paradigms, and yet less they are to actually use in an actual robust computer system. They have a learning curve, which we have also talked about a lot before, that's really steep. I mean, I know it's the right way to do it, but I'm not completely sure that I really know how to do it. It's like: you've got to believe that the grass will be greener on that hill better than in this one right here, but first you've got to go all the way down to go and try that new grass. And the hill is nor easy to downhill, nor easy to climb, You will suffer all the way through but in the end, you'll see that everything is kind of simpler than you thought it was. It wasn't really as hard as you thought and actually, the grass really does taste a hell of a lot better.