I'm not super familiar with Ruby (had a bad initial experience with some awful Rails code and never went back), but maybe?
From what I've read in blog posts, it feels like the coolness of Ruby comes from the feeling of "holy crap, something that would have taken me two days in Java/C/C++ took me an hour with Ruby" (hopefully I'm summarizing this more or less correctly).
Erlang has definitely given that feeling to me. Distributed programming can be really, really hard, and gluing things together with sockets and whatnot can lead to a lot of really difficult bugs. Since Erlang embraces distribution and concurrency as part of its paradigm, it sometimes kind of feels like outright magic. Sometimes things feel like they went a bit...too perfect, like you missed something, when you really haven't.
I'm not going to say that it fixes every issue with concurrency; you can still have race conditions and Mnesia and ets can be a bit finnickey if you're not careful, but I think I can honestly say that, for distributed apps, I can accomplish 20x as much as I could with most other platforms.
From what I've read in blog posts, it feels like the coolness of Ruby comes from the feeling of "holy crap, something that would have taken me two days in Java/C/C++ took me an hour with Ruby" (hopefully I'm summarizing this more or less correctly).
Erlang has definitely given that feeling to me. Distributed programming can be really, really hard, and gluing things together with sockets and whatnot can lead to a lot of really difficult bugs. Since Erlang embraces distribution and concurrency as part of its paradigm, it sometimes kind of feels like outright magic. Sometimes things feel like they went a bit...too perfect, like you missed something, when you really haven't.
I'm not going to say that it fixes every issue with concurrency; you can still have race conditions and Mnesia and ets can be a bit finnickey if you're not careful, but I think I can honestly say that, for distributed apps, I can accomplish 20x as much as I could with most other platforms.