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Comment by Bjartr | Hacker News Reader

I thought it dominated, or was at least popular within, the niche it was developed for, telecom hardware. It is the "Ericsson Language" after all

Is that not the case?

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No. In fact, Erlang was open-sourced because Ericsson gave up on it. From wikipedia:

> In February 1998, Ericsson Radio Systems banned the in-house use of Erlang for new products, citing a preference for non-proprietary languages. The ban caused Armstrong and others to make plans to leave Ericsson. In March 1998 Ericsson announced the AXD301 switch, containing over a million lines of Erlang and reported to achieve a high availability of nine "9"s. In December 1998, the implementation of Erlang was open-sourced and most of the Erlang team resigned to form a new company Bluetail AB. Ericsson eventually relaxed the ban and re-hired Armstrong in 2004.

I know this seems like a black mark on Erlang. I think it just demonstrates the difficulty of carving a new niche. Training developers in a new language and paradigm is hard.

Or someone could read it as the Ericsson management not really understanding the capabilities of their own internal tools, and must've read something up on Java or .NET in an HBR article.

Not really - at least in my days in that industry, the bulk of telco equipment was running C/C++ or Java code. This included Ericsson gear. Ericsson and one or two other telco companies were definitely using it in production, but it wasn't dominant.

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