Considering that most (Unix) OSses are written in C, it would be irrelevant for a language to scale better than C ever could.
Nonsense. A Unix-like OS is an opinionated, general purpose operating system intended to run a wide variety of applications equally well. A well-designed application tuned for a specific purpose written in an appropriate language may outperform a generic application written in C. Go look at the language used for the best FFT libraries on your system; I bet there's Fortran involved. Then look at some of the compile-time optimizations you get in languages where explicit or even implicit purity by default allows for automatic memoization and expression elimination. Throw in automatic parallelization, and you can beat C in terms of performance, scalability, and ease of development.
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If you're discussing a single machine, sure. However, Erlang's major claim to fame is that it scales (nearly) effortlessly across a cluster of machines and does so for (nearly) anything written in it. And it does so with fault tolerance, load balancing, and failover built into the VM. Given that I haven't built a production system that had only one machine for any given part of the application stack, this sounds rather appealing, don't you think?
My criteria for good software:
- Does it work?
- Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?
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