Comparing to PHP Rails is an enormous success, but comparing to J2EE it still has something to catch up.

As for node, I doubt that it is a "success". For me it is just a product of Javascript "sectarian hype" along with cumbersome design decisions.)

The principles and desing decisions behind Erlang are well-researched and "robust". Details are in armstrong-thesis-2003.pdf

That's interesting. To me, J2EE is a pic failure in turns of developer enthusiasm (might be considered successful because of usage). I am yet to meet a developer who likes to code in J2EE and they would take every opportunity to jump ship to just about anything. That said, mine is a startup world and nobody I know writes new code in J2EE.

It controls serving of probably more than 50% of world smartphone to internet data traffic. That is pretty successful.

It handles tens of billions of messages per day for Whatsapp, that is successful.

Riak and RabbitMQ handle a lot of data and messages for many companies.

Ejabberd and derivatives are probably the default enterprise chat/XMPP backends.

If anything one can argue it is more successful than any of those technologies.

What are node's success stories? Paypal, Walmart, New York times. I haven't been following but those are ones I remember using it.

I have nothing against Erlang. Good for erlang if its successful. I wonder why then I see AOL these defensive posts about why Erlang has not been adopted enough