I'm seeing companies that manage to stay competitive because they are using Erlang. If a company manages to make things happen with less resources, it means that resources are available to invest in other things.

To me that is enough to qualify as an "economic driver".

If your argument is that Erlang is not contributing more to GNP than what disappear in rounding errors (or even that), then sure, companies using Erlang are contributing peanuts compared to what products from companies like Microsoft and Oracle are.

If you're seeing companies that use it to stay competitive, then that's a good sign.

I was simply pondering on the whole discussion because I have yet to see a posting requiring usage or or experience with, Erlang.

Not to say they're not out there, just I haven't seen it yet.

Exactly. well said. this is the issue I am trying to raise. Companies are not hiring Erlang programmers, because they simply do not know what they are missing. what you don't know, hurts you more. existing problems are there that need to be resolved but there is lack of awareness on what's new and what is out there that can address the problem directly and efficiently and most economically. We have idle multi core processors that are underutilized since around a decade now, and we scale our load balancing by buying more servers. We need strong matrix arithmatic computers, so we buy higher colck cycles with multi cores setting idle, all underutilized with multi threading which was designed for single core CPUs back in the 70s and 80s.

All that is supposed to change, when Microsoft launches .NET 4 and C# 4.0 with it which is the first concurrent programming language from Microsoft and along with that Microsoft is supposed to raise awareness on multi core, and concerrency. And this is the problem!

The industry, economy, development and evolution of systems can not be held back pending a single company like Microsoft, Apple, etc.

Computer science and it's applications need to be utilized properly and timely.

As far as I know, Clojure is a scripted multithreaded langauge that targets JVM. it is not a concurrent language. almost all current programming languages are like that. The upcoming C# 4.0 will be concurrent C#. which is yet to come.