I do believe that Erlang is the right tool for the job when you're building a distributed database, especially for the distribution part. For a company like Basho it's understandably a good investment to take expert distributed systems/database engineers and let them take their time learning Erlang.

If, however, you, like most of us, are not building a distributed database, think carefully before you choose Erlang, especially if you're in a startup.

Most startups don't have a distributed database as their core technology, and for many startups, it's important that developers can push production code from day one.