To me, Erlang/Elixir’s power is not necessarily the Actor model implementation, the matching from prolog, immutability, behaviors, etc, but Joes desire to demonstrate you could do more with less.

It is a well thought out and trued system of computation that has a consistency rarely witnessed in other languages, much less the “web”. It is not perfect. But it is pretty impressive.

Unfortunately, I find the appreciation and uptake for what simplicity empowers in the software world pretty under appreciated. Complexity allows people to become specialists, managers to have big teams and lots of meetings, experts to stay experts.

Erlang was being developed in a period where companies were trying to implement software solutions with smaller headcounts, limited horsepower, etc. A multi decade outpouring of cash into the domain has made the value of “less will mean more for all of us in good ways” less of an attractor.