Coincidence: I was just noodling around youtube and saw that "Still Alive" from Portal was added 17 years ago. I'm pretty sure I've discovered a date bug in youtube.

I think Erlang day was mostly a joke to make the website more 'boring' to wannabe l33t h4x0rs.

> some would say fetish

And there it is

But it’s all fetish-positive — people really do admire the language and the runtime.

Wow 16 years ago. I remember that day.

I think OTP is pretty much universally admired, the language syntax and tooling much less so.

Erlangers generally dismiss criticisms about syntax as unimportant, but looking at the popularity of Elixir (which compiles to the same VM) suggests they're wrong about discounting syntax as important when it comes to adoption. Another new language that targets the BEAM VM is Gleam, which looks fantastic.

From reading Armstrong's stories about the origins of Erlang, it seems to me the Prolog syntax was an accident of history and a pragmatic engineering decision at the time, more than it was the deliberate choice of a careful language designer. That suggests that other options shouldn't be dismissed.