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Comment by myth_drannon | Hacker News Reader

"In February 1998 Erlang was banned for new product development within Ericsson—the main reason for the ban was that Ericsson wanted to be a consumer of software technologies rather than a producer." - The creator of the language banned any use of it internally.

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Being a consumer rather than a producer of tech is strictly a business decision. There's significant cost to producing and maintaining a language, and Ericsson no longer wanted to pay the upkeep.

That's not necessarily an indictment on the language itself. The alternative would have been to keep using it while also open sourcing it, but I'm guessing they just wanted to be able to hire cheaper C developers or whatever the flavor of the time was.

No, the company the creators worked for. And six years later they hired Armstrong again and silently lifted the ban.

It is wildly disingenuous to just copy paste that line from wikipedia and not the rest of the paragraph.

> In February 1998, Ericsson Radio Systems banned the in-house use of Erlang for new products, citing a preference for non-proprietary languages.[15] The ban caused Armstrong and others to make plans to leave Ericsson.[16] In March 1998 Ericsson announced the AXD301 switch,[8] containing over a million lines of Erlang and reported to achieve a high availability of nine "9"s.[17] In December 1998, the implementation of Erlang was open-sourced and most of the Erlang team resigned to form a new company, Bluetail AB.[8] Ericsson eventually relaxed the ban and re-hired Armstrong in 2004.

- edit, poster was quoting a quote in the article, not wikipedia, the article is the one omitting the context

But from the quote it seems that for reasons unrelated to the language itself?

Right. Companies need to figure out what they are going to be good at and what you buy from someone else. There is no one correct answer, and often the best answer changes over time (both reasons that different companies will have different answers). My company architects have been debating what IPC framework we should adopt for longer than it would take me to just write one from scratch - but they are correct to debate this instead of writing one because adopting means we don't have to maintain it and eventually that should cost more than all the debate. (note I didn't say will, though I think it is likely)

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