>It's unlikely that an open source language is both "secret", and has oodles of libraries - things don't tend to work that way.
That is true, but, at the same time, irrelevant. For example, at my company we do e-mail archiving. Does Erlang have any libraries to facilitate that? No. Not even close. But Apache Lucene does. So, what we do is use the Erlang OTP Java interface [1] to allow Erlang to handle the message passing and parallelization, while Lucene handles the actual indexing and search.
The way I see it, Erlang makes it very easy to add a message passing layer on top of whatever single-threaded process you currently have. This allows you to scale your applications without having to muck about with their internals too much - you launch multiple instances of your existing single threaded code and use Erlang to handle all the messiness of message passing.
I think that is what makes Erlang such a secret weapon. The fact that you can very easily add a message passing layer to anything with Erlang greatly simplifies the job of parallelizing existing programs.
That is true, but, at the same time, irrelevant. For example, at my company we do e-mail archiving. Does Erlang have any libraries to facilitate that? No. Not even close. But Apache Lucene does. So, what we do is use the Erlang OTP Java interface [1] to allow Erlang to handle the message passing and parallelization, while Lucene handles the actual indexing and search.
The way I see it, Erlang makes it very easy to add a message passing layer on top of whatever single-threaded process you currently have. This allows you to scale your applications without having to muck about with their internals too much - you launch multiple instances of your existing single threaded code and use Erlang to handle all the messiness of message passing.
I think that is what makes Erlang such a secret weapon. The fact that you can very easily add a message passing layer to anything with Erlang greatly simplifies the job of parallelizing existing programs.
[1] http://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/jinterface/java/com/ericsson/...